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Spencer review: Kristen Stewart dazzles in unconventional Princess Diana biopic

The actress delivers one of her best performances yet.

In an enormous, pristine, mostly unadorned kitchen, a sign on the wall warns the assembled staff: "Keep noise to a minimum. They can hear you."

The room is the kitchen at Sandringham House; the "they" is the British royal family, gathered at the English country estate for Christmas in the early '90s. The sign appears early in Pablo Larraín 's Spencer , in which it might be more to the point for it to read not that they can hear you , but that they're always listening. The film's versions of Elizabeth II & Co. don't really hear anyone — however much a person cries out who they are or what they need — and least heard of all is Kristen Stewart 's Princess Diana, from whose tortured perspective the defiantly eccentric biopic unravels.

A fictionalized account of a fraught holiday wherein Diana (née Spencer) decides to break with her high-profile husband, the film chronicles three days' worth of torment in the form of humiliating rituals, stiffly formal meals, and countless pre-assigned wardrobe changes. Sandringham is huge, but Larraín renders it deeply claustrophobic (with an expert assist from Jonny Greenwood 's unnerving score), with various diverse reminders that they can hear you should you deviate from their script. As the walls of the country house seem to close in, the avenues for escape — or even just a little rebellion — become ever narrower; sometimes all she can do is wear the Boxing Day dress for Christmas breakfast, unless it was the Christmas Eve dinner dress for Christmas church.

The film is dense with poetic motifs, many bleeding into the iconography of royalty itself — fairy tales, currency, ancient families (including Diana's own; she famously had more "royal blood" than Charles does). Larraín opens the movie with the ominous intertitle: "A fable from a true tragedy," and the action is haunted not only by the painful awareness of the people's princess' eventual untimely end, but also by the actual ghost of Anne Boleyn. Diana darkly identifies with Henry VIII's second wife, becoming fixated on the dark fate of her fellow scorned royal-by-marriage. Like another English Christmas ghost story, Spencer is preoccupied with the past, present, and future: At Sandringham, Diana drily tells her sons, time doesn't exist across all three tenses — there is no future, and past and present are made one.

It's the scenes with little William and Harry that give the admittedly strange film some kind of anchor. Stewart, typically a picture of California cool herself, emanates such palpable warmth in the conspiratorial moments Diana shares with her children that the world of the movie temporarily transforms. The frozen prison of a castle — she repeatedly complains that she wishes the staff would turn up the heating — becomes cozy when Diana's capacity for love, which melted hearts the world over but failed to touch the icy family she married into, is given a purpose in the sons to whom she was so devoted.

For all of Larraín's artistry, Spencer would crumble in the hands of the wrong actress, and Stewart gives one of the best performances of her career so far as this highly subjective version of Diana. Physically, she's the perfect almost-match; not so unlike the princess that it's distracting to see her in the role, but not such a vivid doppelganger that her image seems to claim total verisimilitude for the film as a whole. She's Diana, but ever-so-slightly off, in such a way that an audience can simultaneously buy into and detach from Larraín's imagined royal nightmare.

Jacqueline Durran's immaculate wardrobe , in collaboration with Claire Mathon's arresting cinematography, cleverly collaborate to make the actress appear longer (Diana was five inches taller than the woman playing her), and Stewart's prim posture, shy tilt of her head, and sighing accent are unmistakable — as is the greatness of her devastatingly hopeful performance. Gentle though she keeps her voice, she makes you really hear her. Grade: A-

‘Spencer’ Review: Prisoner of the House of Windsor

Kristen Stewart stars as an anguished, rebellious Princess Diana in Pablo Larraín’s answer to “The Crown.”

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‘Spencer’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The director pablo larraín narrates a sequence from his film featuring kristen stewart..

“Hello, my name is Pablo Larraín and I am the director of Spencer. This scene is very important in the movie and it’s in the first third of the film. And we see Diana walking into a dinner where all the royal family is there. Diana, of course, is played by Kristen Stewart. And it’s the very first scene where we start to see what she sees and feel what she’s feeling. And how do we do that? That was the question. How do we invite the audience to her point of view of the situation? And some of the things aren’t really happening and they are just happening in her imagination, in her perception, in her own fantasy of the reality. And that reality somehow interfere with a conflict that have already happened to her with the family. So we are really seeing the consequences of that conflict. The main consequence is her mental distress and how she could eventually start seeing things that aren’t really there. We did a lot of shots. It’s one of the scenes of this film that has more coverage, like pretty much everyone there got a single shot and then we cover it from different angles. Because I thought that we needed that material for later in the editing room, we could find the right rhythm in order to cut it properly. So it’s really a scene that have a very precise ascension where we started with a slow kind of like minimalistic rhythm. And then as it goes by, it creates more and more intensity up to the point that it’s almost unbearable. And I wanted to hit that limit, I wanted to go as far as we could in terms of intensity, volume. And obviously, Jonny Greenwood’s music is very relevant for the operation of the scene. I also felt that it was important for Kristen to feel the pressure of the family. So what I did, is that I asked Kristen to stay away from the set up until everything was very ready, and she never walked in and never saw them up until we shot that arrival. And she has this necklace that we know that Charles gave that necklace to Camilla Parker Bowles. And the audience knows that that necklace is not just a necklace, it’s the representation of a broken marriage, a representation of a very painful gift. So we discussed this with Jonny Greenwood, our composer, in terms of how this should be played. And I remember asking him to create something that could have a progression from something, from music that could be played in that context, that is music that is sort of designed to disappear, just to be in the background, and then eventually becomes very relevant and very intense and helps you define what she’s going through.” [CLATTERING] “So it’s a very beautiful and strange work, because the composition evolves into a state of panic. That was very important for the process of making the scene and for the result of the scene.” [MUSIC INTENSIFIES] “And we feel for her, we feel with her, and I think Kristen does an incredible work to sort of handle the physicality, the emotions. It’s a scene with no dialogue, it’s just music and sort of the cinematic progression and the dramatic progression and the interaction between her, the Queen, Anne Boleyn, and of course, Charles.”

By A.O. Scott

“Spencer” is a Christmas movie, in which a big, dysfunctional family gathers at the holiday to feast, exchange gifts and engage in peculiar traditions meant to provide “a bit of fun.”

“Spencer” is a horror movie about a fragile woman held captive in a spooky mansion, tormented by sadistic monsters and their treacherous minions.

“Spencer” is a psychological thriller about a powerful, unaccountable authoritarian cabal conspiring to crush the spirit of an independent-minded rebel.

“Spencer” is a love story, a melodrama of maternal devotion, an early-’90s fashion parade and a very British baking show. (The scones and pastries are organic.)

“Spencer,” described by its director, Pablo Larraín, as “a fable from a true tragedy,” is all of the above, and also a fact-inspired drama about Diana, Princess of Wales, played with grit and grace by Kristen Stewart . Diana, who died in a car crash in 1997 — and whose maiden name gives Larraín’s film its title — is hardly an obscure figure. A global celebrity and tabloid fixture in her lifetime, she remains somehow irresistible.

Her troubled marriage to Prince Charles and her vexed relations with her royal in-laws have been subject to scrutiny from every angle, most recently in “The Crown,” where she was played in the last season by Emma Corrin. (In the next one, Elizabeth Debicki will take up the role.) A superficial reading of “Spencer,” which takes place over three days (from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day) in 1991, might see it as a sidebar to “The Crown,” lingering over a minor episode in a vast epic and isolating a single, relatively minor character amid the pomp and pageantry of palace life.

That is exactly wrong. Larraín and the screenwriter, Steven Knight, offer not a footnote but an ardent and unsparing rebuke to the mythical monarchist mumbo-jumbo that the Netflix series (to which I am entirely addicted) exists to promote. The conceit of “The Crown” is that, for all their flaws, defeats and compromises — or because of all that — the members of the House of Windsor are fundamentally more interesting than anybody else. Their dilemmas are more exquisite, their choices more tragic, than anything the commoners can know.

This is a persistent conceit in the literature of power, one that Larraín, wielding his camera like a rapier and Jonny Greenwood’s lacerating score like a stiletto, leaves in tatters. The only members of the royal family whose voices are heard in “Spencer” are Charles (Jack Farthing) and his mother (Stella Gonet). Queen Elizabeth is as bland and cold as a dish of old porridge. Her eldest son, at least with Diana, is callous and cruel, mocking her eating disorder and lecturing her on the necessity of keeping up appearances.

“There have to be two of you,” he says — one for “the people” and one in private. (Like much of Knight’s script, these lines explain things a little too bluntly.) But one of the reasons Diana was called “the people’s princess” was that she seemed always and authentically herself, an idea that Larraín, Knight and Stewart implicitly endorse. She’s devoted to “what’s real,” and describes her tastes and interests, in a flawless aristocratic accent, as “middle class.” Fast food. Musical theater. Driving her European sports car instead of being chauffeured in a Rolls-Royce .

She wants to be herself, and she wants to be free. Larraín, who is Chilean, has made a handful of tough , unsettling films about life in his country under a military dictatorship determined to control the thought and behavior of its subjects. While “Spencer” hardly equates Queen Elizabeth with Pinochet, the power that the crown exerts over Diana can accurately be described as totalitarian.

Preparations for Christmas at Sandringham House — a moated mansion near the Norfolk coast — have the character of a military operation. Groceries are delivered by armed soldiers, and the chief of the kitchen “brigade” (Sean Harris) is like a field commander. (He’s also one of the few people in the castle who treats Diana with kindness.) Everything is scheduled down to the minute: sandwiches, meals, hunting parties. Diana is instructed on which outfit she must wear for each activity.

The dresses are tagged “P.O.W.” It stands for “Princess of Wales,” of course. Still, Diana, in the midst of marital combat with Charles (who is having an affair with a briefly glimpsed, never named Camilla Parker-Bowles), is very much a prisoner. She glides through empty corridors and chambers under constant surveillance. Her every notion, whim and word is observed and reported. She is entirely alone, with no real privacy or solitude. Her only comfort is the company of her sons, William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry).

“Spencer” is, finally, a study in the psychological effects of captivity. Diana, fragile when she arrives at Sandringham — and the subject of much “concern” from the Windsors, spirals toward a breakdown over the next 72 hours. She hallucinates the ghost of Anne Boleyn, pierces the skin on her arm with a wire-cutter and acts out in ways that alarm her children and disgust the prince.

Watching over her with sympathy — though not necessarily on her side — are two members of the royal staff. Major Gregory (Timothy Spall) tries to reason her into compliance, at one point telling a hair-raising story about his military service that is apparently meant to emphasize the importance of duty. Diana’s favorite dresser, Maggie (Sally Hawkins), is a more steadfast ally, a sympathetic ear and then something more.

“Spencer” is a companion piece to “Jackie,” Larraín’s 2016 film about Jacqueline Kennedy in the aftermath of her husband’s assassination. Both movies examine the isolation and paranoia of a woman at the mercy of political forces and family interests beyond her control, and turn on the heroine’s attempt at resistance. “Spencer” seems to me the more coherent film, partly because the directness of Stewart’s performance stands out so poignantly against the moral vacuity and aesthetic constipation of her surroundings.

Stewart leverages her own star power to turn Diana into someone familiar. The intimacy and care the character craves is something the audience feels compelled to supply. Our sympathy is more than pity, and “Spencer” is more than the portrait of a woman in distress. If it’s a fable, it’s a political fable, an allegory of powerlessness, revolt and liberation.

Spencer Rated R. Not a fairy tale. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters.

An earlier version of this article misstated the given name of the character played by Sally Hawkins in "Spencer." She is Maggie, not Mary.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at [email protected] . Learn more

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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Spencer review: Kristen Stewart dazzles in unconventional Princess Diana biopic

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