Spencer (12A)

Diana, Princess of Wales, travels to the Sandringham estate during the three-day Christmas celebrations in 1991 into a world of ritual where guests are weighed on arrival to prove they have gained at least three pounds as evidence of their gluttonous enjoyment. For Diana, in the vice-like grip of bulimia, the indignity of sitting on scales is just one of many ways she feels she is being set up to fail. Tensions escalate as equerry Major Alistair Gregory surveys Diana's every move.

LondonNet Film Review
Spencer (12A)

Billed as “a fable from a true tragedy”, Spencer imagines turmoil and tantrums behind the impeccably hung curtains of the Sandringham estate during the three-day Christmas celebrations in 1991. It would be the final Yuletide before Andrew Morton’s explosive biography Diana: Her True Story and the formal announcement from Buckingham Palace that the Prince and Princess of Wales had decided to separate. Pablo Larrain’s hallucinogenic picture, penned by Steven Knight, begins with the military-escorted arrival of ingredients for Royal Family’s feast: a lavishly choreographed spectacle awash with lobsters and poultry that wouldn’t seem out of place in a period drama like The Crown…

Spencer deviates from chocolate box convention and hews more closely to the unsettling disorientation of Larrain’s 2016 picture Jackie, depicting a suffocating world of ritual where guests are weighed on arrival to prove they have gained at least three pounds as evidence of their gluttonous enjoyment. For Diana (Kristen Stewart), in the vice-like grip of bulimia, the indignity of sitting on scales is just one of many ways she feels she is being set up to fail. “You have to make your body do things you hate… for the good of the country,” quietly explains Charles (Jack Farthing).

It is a brief moment of peace before wrenched sobs over toilet bowls and repeated costume changes into meticulously labelled outfits chosen by the Prince of Wales for his wife to wear under the scrutiny of equerry Major Alistair Gregory (Timothy Spall). Stewart delivers a riveting, tour-de-force performance that marks her as a frontrunner at next year’s Oscars. She adopts some of Diana’s mannerisms and vocal speech patterns to vanish completely in the role of a mother who dotes on her boys and develops a grim fixation on the fate of Anne Boleyn (Amy Manson).

In one of the film’s most striking sequences, Diana imagines tugging furiously at pearls around her neck – identical to white beads gifted by Charles to Camilla – and spilling the lustrous white orbs into a bowl of soup, which she gulps down to the point of choking. “Will they kill me?” she asks Royal head chef Darren McGrady (Sean Harris) after she runs uncomfortably late for arrival at Sandringham.

Spencer lets those words linger in the air before continuing its woozy whirl through state rooms, trading paranoid glances with other members of the Royal Family including Queen Elizabeth II (Stella Gonet) and the Duke of Edinburgh (Richard Sammel). Knight’s script takes creative liberties to imagine fever dreams and conversations behind closed doors, spinning Diana’s world out of control and us with her. We can hold on tight but Larrain doesn’t afford his tearful and tormented Diana that luxury.

– Sarah Lee