Movie review: Spencer is an absorbing character study of Princess Diana

Kristen Stewart in Spencer

★★★★☆

‘No one is above tradition,’ Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart) is told at a crucial point in Spencer (12A), which unfolds over the three days of the British royal family’s Christmas holiday at Sandringham in the early 1990s.

Long since disabused of any fairytale notions she might have had about her marriage to Prince Charles (Jack Farthing) — the film is subtitled ‘A Fable from a True Tragedy’ — Diana is feeling suffocated by tradition, and seems to be trembling on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Determined not to be destroyed, Diana begins the long and tortuous journey towards her independence.

Written by Steven Knight and directed by Pablo Larraín, Spencer is an absorbing character study of a woman who has come to believe that she is ‘a magnet for madness’. There are times when the script works its metaphors a little too hard — Diana is repeatedly compared to Anne Boleyn, for example, and there’s a whole subplot about beautiful pheasants being ‘bred for the gun’ — but when the story allows Kristen Stewart the time and space to fully inhabit the restlessly distressed Diana, the film comes alive.

Stewart is in such stunning form here that it’s very easy to forget you’re watching a performance; each little deft touch, every one of the mannered affectations, adds another layer to her poignant portrayal of a woman besieged on all sides.

But while Stewart is certainly the focus, it’s by no means a one-woman show, and she gets very strong support from Timothy Spall, Sean Harris and particularly Sally Hawkins, who plays Diana’s lady-in-waiting.

Jonny Greenwood’s discordant, jazzy score echoes Diana’s disorientation, and Claire Mathon’s cinematography conjures a crisp, bleak beauty from a rural English Christmas, both of them contributing handsomely to an emotionally intense fictionalised biopic that bears comparison with Pablo Larraín’s Jackie (2016). 

(cinema release)