Kristen Stewart is remarkable as Diana over three Christmas days at Sandringham, and Claire Mathon and Jonny Greenwood build her a proper haunted house. Steven Knight’s script keeps announcing what we can already see, and the one note wears thin.
Pablo Larraín opens with a title card calling this “a fable from a true tragedy”, which is a polite request that we not check the facts, and we are happy to oblige. Spencer takes three days at Sandringham, Christmas Eve to Boxing Day, and stages them as a horror film in which the monster is a timetable. Diana (Kristen Stewart) arrives late, is weighed in the hall, finds her dresses hung with cards saying which meal each is for, and spends the rest of the film looking for a room where nobody is listening. Larraín did something close to this with Jacqueline Kennedy in Jackie in 2016: one woman, a few days, the camera rarely more than an arm’s length from her face.
Stewart is good, and not in the way we expected. The tilted head and the upward glance are there, but she does not build the performance out of them. What she plays is a woman who can no longer tell which of her own gestures are hers and which were issued to her. Watch her in the corridor outside the dining room, getting her breathing under control before a door opens, or at the kitchen table with the head chef, Darren (Sean Harris), being allowed for a minute to talk like a person. The accent holds. The pauses are placed, not fumbled.
Claire Mathon shoots the house in soft, grainy light, as if there were always a little mist in the air, and keeps Stewart in close-up with ceilings and portraits crowding in behind her. Guy Hendrix Dyas gives Sandringham long corridors and cold reds, a house built to be walked through by staff. Jacqueline Durran’s costumes are the film’s neatest idea, because the schedule is hung on the rail with them: this dress for lunch, that one for church. Jonny Greenwood’s score sets a string quartet playing something stately until a jazz drummer barges in and the strings lose their place. It is the best thing in the film. Sebastián Sepúlveda cuts to it, letting a scene run long and then jumping without warning to a field or an empty stairwell.
The Christmas Eve dinner is where the film got at us. Diana sits at the long table with the family watching and cannot leave alone the pearls Charles (Jack Farthing) has given her, the same pearls, she believes, he has given someone else. What she does with them we will not describe, but Greenwood’s drums come up, Mathon holds on her mouth, and we flinched and kept flinching. It is the one scene where Larraín’s horror manners pay off completely. Nobody at the table reacts.
The trouble is Steven Knight’s script, which cannot leave anything unsaid. The Queen (Stella Gonet) tells Diana that the only portrait that matters is the one on the ten pound note. Charles explains that there have to be two of you, the real one and the one they photograph. Major Alistair Gregorys (Timothy Spall), brought in to run the house to the minute, delivers speeches about soldiers and duty that Spall does his best to make sound like a man talking. Each of these lines tells us something Mathon’s camera had already shown. Then there is Anne Boleyn (Amy Manson), who turns up first in a book left on Diana’s bed and then in the flesh, in case anyone had missed the point about a king who tired of his wife.
By the second day we were bored, and then irritated at being bored, because everything in front of us was made with such care. The film has one note, Diana suffering in a beautiful room, and it holds that note for 116 minutes. Only Harris and Sally Hawkins, as her dresser Maggie, are allowed to change the temperature. Hawkins is warm and quick in a handful of scenes and the film brightens every time she walks in. She does not walk in often enough.
Against Larraín’s own standard it is a step down from Jackie, which used the same approach and had more to say with it. Against the usual British royal drama it is a relief: nobody defers and nobody explains the constitution. It is a 12A, and the scenes with William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry), whispering with their mother under a blanket, are the gentlest thing in it.
Watch it alone if you can. It is a film about a woman who wants to be left by herself in a room, and it plays best to someone who already is.
