Her Majesty
Spencer might aim to distill three days in the life of Princess Diana, but it’s so far from a traditional biopic. Pablo Larraín frames the beloved royal as a woman trapped in a haunted house – literal, emotional, spiritual. Ryan Ninesling explains how the horror comes from England itself in one of the most chilling films of the year.
The opening title of Spencer, Pablo Larraín’s chilling portrait of a fateful few days in the life of Princess Diana, bills the film as a “fable from a true tragedy.” Fable is an apt word to describe the filmmaker’s second exploration of a woman doomed by a high-profile marriage, as Spencer feels like a spiritual follow-up to his 2016 character study of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Jackie, with sinister, supernatural elements more in line with a fairy tale than a biopic. Diana, masterfully brought to life by Kristen Stewart, is the beating heart of the caustic world Larraín creates. But even Stewart’s dazzling, raw performance doesn’t stop the filmmaker pushing the boundaries of the traditional biopic into something uncanny.
Set over Christmas 1991, mostly at the Queen’s favoured holiday retreat Sandringham Estate, Spencer in many ways tells a familiar tale of a woman trapped in a haunted house. Larraín’s brilliant subversion of that premise transforms the idea of physical space into an institutional one, turning the trappings of English tradition and royalty into a spectral presence haunting Diana long before the film begins. The house isn’t Sandringham, which the filmmaker shoots with the same palpable dread as the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. It isn’t even the House of Windsor, the royal family that Diana finds herself trapped in. The haunted house is England itself, the ancient ideal of the Empire and its many traditions that trap Diana within its creaky, bloodstained walls.
Larraín, a Chilean director born in the shadow of the Pinochet regime, has a clear interest in the way England has maintained its stiff upper lip and glossy pretence on the back of centuries of violent oppression and subjugation. He doesn’t paint a rosy picture of the royal family, but it is this imperialist, decadent vision of England as a holy power that he particularly takes issue with. The filmmaker is most inherently interested in the translation of institutional violence into individual abuse, how underneath the glitz and glamour of elegant meals and Rolls Royces filled with corgis, the family engages in emotional torment mirroring what country does on an imperial scale abroad. In a moment where the Queen declares peace in a Christmastime address while the U.K. government quietly supports the abuses of Larraín’s home country, the irony and hypocrisy hangs heavy in the air.
Diana, embodied by Stewart as the idea of the “people’s princess”, is painted as a woman craving normality but cornered by the centuries-old traditions that the Crown simultaneously inspires and demands. Larraín doesn’t fail to acknowledge her privilege in having been born into royalty and wealth, or the sometimes spoilt nature of her sarcastic rebukes and immediate concerns (the pressure of slipping into a dress with 10 minutes to dinner isn’t exactly the same as the kind of pressures facing most of the world). He also plays up her larger-than-life and even camp persona, always armed with a perfect quip. She snaps at an aide “to get out so I can masturbate” and pokes fun at herself for having to spend her holidays looking at “fucking landmines.”
However, the filmmaker recognises in her a spiritual kinship with everyday people, how her wants are stifled by the tenets of an institution she is forced to obey but never asked for. Despite her desire to drive her own car, enjoy fast food, and live a life out of the spotlight, she is hunted by paparazzi and hounded by family employees who live and die by the code inscribed by the values of affluent “polite” English society, which instruct to hide your feelings and stick to whatever instructions are prescribed. They are afraid of almost everything about Diana: her emotion, her tendency to speak freely, her bristling at the regimentation of her entire life. With one of the institution’s most public faces threatening to uproot the system these people depend on, they see her as a menace to their way of life.
Diana’s most virulent enemy in Spencer isn’t the barely seen Queen or the meek, bitter Prince Charles; it’s the house butler Major Gregory – played with quiet menace by Timothy Spall – who stands out as her true tormentor, a former military operative whose preference for following every rule imaginable puts him in stark contrast to Diana. Like the ghosts in The Shining, Gregory appears out of nowhere in the princess’s most vulnerable moments, warning her to stay in line without ever directly tormenting her. In one of the film’s most uncomfortable scenes, he attempts to intimidate her by telling a story of his military background, describing a fellow soldier attempting to tell him of a horse he owned that couldn’t be tamed.
Before he could finish, the soldier was shot dead by an IRA gunman, Spall’s cold delivery and evocation of violence showing that Diana is opposed by an institution hellbent on control, with a long, bloody history standing behind that quest for power. Gregory’s implication that the soldier’s death was worth the price of protecting the Crown tells Diana that she must tame the “wild beast” inside her to maintain the status quo, lest she suffer the consequences. Despite his rigid demeanour, Gregory’s intimidation comes from an anxiety that his way of life is disappearing; the less icy Diana presents a weakness he cannot bear the thought of. However, Diana still stands triumphant: she tells Gregory she hopes the horse was never tamed.
Larraín mines Stewart’s talent to evoke the psychological toll the spectre of the institution is having on Diana. The royal family is mostly pushed to the edges of the picture, their presence rarely seen but always felt. The walls of the seemingly omniscient house, closing in and “hearing everything”, send her into states of nightmarish hallucinations. In one scene, Diana imagines herself swallowing pearls during dinner. In another, she is seemingly reunited with Maggie (a devastatingly lovely Sally Hawkins), her dismissed royal dresser and one of her few real friends, only to realise the woman she’s hugging is an unfamiliar maid.
Diana is plagued by an eating disorder and struggles with self-harm, moments Stewart brings to life with desperation and genuine pain. Condescending, preposterous acts of control – humiliating Diana via a Christmas weigh-in, sewing her curtains shut, dismissing her only confidant – are pathetic attempts to isolate Diana in order to maintain the pristine image of the family, one that they even know is a facade. Even the Queen herself, in her only scene with real dialogue, admits to Diana that the country sees them as “just currency”, tender for the nation to flaunt out of some misplaced sense of pride and delusion, a vision of glory and affluence that’s long lost its lustre. To be yourself in this hierarchy is to devalue the worth it holds in society. Stewart, and the film itself, empathise with the horror of being trapped in a system that strips you of your sense of self, whispering in your ear to be prim to prop up the rotting facade of an institution that’s nothing more than make-believe.
The eerie atmosphere of the house becomes literally haunted as Diana reads a biography of Anne Boleyn, and begins to see her royal ancestor’s ghostly presence walking the low-lit halls of Sandringham like a phantom straight out of Jack Clayton’s The Innocents. Diana sees herself in Boleyn, a kindred figure whose fight for self-respect cost her her life. But Boleyn becomes more sinister as Spencer progresses, threatening to consume Diana in an actual state of possession. Diana meets the ghost of Boleyn and the ghosts of her past in a dilapidated Park House (the Spencer family home), which Larraín retcons from its real-life status as a hotel to a symbol of what could befall the royal family should they let the institution die.
Diana is forced to banish Boleyn’s ghost from herself in a moment of self-exorcism, flashing back through her life and finding solace in a vision of the freedom of her youth. She destroys her pearl necklace – a gift from Charles that she earlier compared to the gash where Boleyn’s head was struck off – and Boleyn disappears along with any remaining sense of duty to the family. It’s a moment that feels like a cleansing of the soul of England itself, a rejection of the rigidity demanded by its historical ties and a step into a future free from the pressures of the past. Most importantly, it’s a scene that sees Diana triumph over her own horror at not being seen as good enough for the family. With Boleyn, she lies to rest the ghost of her own anxiety and self-doubt, which makes the realisation she will live only a few more years after the film concludes all the more heartbreaking.
While Spencer is a film about its namesake, it also uses her story to examine the United Kingdom as a country haunted by its own identity. It is a ghostly fable that deals in fantasy; Stewart’s Diana experiences a nightmarish Christmas that only exists in the memory of the film, but that doesn’t make it any less truthful. Larraín flirts with the spectral to condemn the preposterous nature of the monarchy. Underneath the extravagance, mystique, and absurd fantasy lies a dark truth: those who seek to protect the Crown do so out of fear. Fear of change, fear of progress, fear of equity. In Larraín’s England, that fear is the tool that keeps the house from crumbling into the deep.
Ryan Ninesling is a film critic and programmer based in London who has previously written for The Quietus, Film Cred, and more. He is the curator of an upcoming season of films called Human Resources and is probably talking to his cat about Dune right now.
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