kristen stewart diana movie review

an image, when javascript is unavailable

‘Spencer’ Review: Kristen Stewart Transforms in Pablo Larraín’s Masterly Princess Diana Movie

The director of "Jackie" has made an enthralling drama of Diana's moment of truth and transition.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

‘The Last Stop in Yuma County’ Review: An Accomplished Pressure-Cooker Thriller That’s Like a Tarantino-Fueled Noir, 30 Years Later 24 hours ago
‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ Review: The Franchise Essentially Reboots with a Tale of Survival Set — At Last — in the Ape-Ruled Future 3 days ago
Restored and Rereleased, the Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ Is Revealed to Be the Joyful Documentary It Always Was 4 days ago

And here’s the beauty part: Right off, we feel as if we’re seeing… Diana . The real thing. Kristen Stewart doesn’t just do an impersonation (though on the level of impersonation she’s superb). She transforms; she changes her aspect, her rhythm, her karma. Watching her play Diana, we see an echo, perhaps, of Stewart’s own ambivalent relationship to stardom — the way that she’ll stand on an awards podium, chewing her lip, reveling in the attention even as she’s slightly uncomfortable with it (and even as she makes that distrust of the limelight a key element of her stardom). Mostly, though, what we see in Stewart’s Diana is a woman of homegrown elegance, with a luminosity that pours out of her, except that part of her is now driven to crush that radiance, because her life has become a wreck.

“Spencer” is a movie made very much in the spirit of Larraín’s “Jackie,” the 2016 drama in which Natalie Portman brilliantly portrayed Jackie Kennedy during the week following the JFK assassination. I thought “Jackie” was a knockout, and “Spencer,” which also finds its heroine living through a fateful moment of truth and transition, is every bit as good; it may be even better. The entire film is set over the Christmas holiday, about 10 years after the 1981 wedding of Diana and Prince Charles, and it takes the form of a you are-there voyeuristic diary of what Diana was going through as she came to realize that her disenchantment with her life had become defining, consuming.

In the movie, we see a princess, a woman of power and true majesty, who is treated like a child. Major Gregory, played by a disarmingly gaunt and severe-looking Timothy Spall, has been brought onto the premises to keep an eye on her, and his watchful gaze makes her feel like a pinned insect. And Diana’s lady-in-waiting, Maggie (Sally Hawkins), is her one trusted confidante — but for that very reason, Maggie gets sent away. There can be no secrets. And there are none. At Sandringham, the walls have ears.

“Spencer” is an intimate speculative drama that stays as close as it can to everything we know about Diana. At the same time, the movie is infused with a poetic extravagance. The remarkable production design, by Guy Hendrix Dyas, turns the interiors of Sandringham into a profusion of textures that dance before our eyes — the patterned curtains and gilded wallpaper, the carved paneling, the warm light of the chandeliers, the paintings and upholstery and mirrors and knickknacks. And Jonny Greenwood’s ominous jazzy score seems to have a direct pipeline to Diana’s emotions. Larraín places Di in this luxe getaway palace as if he were making a royal version of “The Shining,” though part of what’s bracing about the movie is that the members of the royal family have come to think it’s Diana who’s the monster. They regard the attention she receives as a threat to who they are, and they’re right. What they’re in denial of is that the media is creating a new world that’s going to squeeze them out.

Yes, she has wealth, comfort, privilege, fame. But life within the gilded cage of the royal family is also stifling. As she explains to her sons, William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry), that’s because it’s a life that makes time stand still. “Here,” she says, “there is only one tense. There is no future. Past and present are the same thing.” What she’s talking about is an existence in which “tradition” is code for what has been, and what always will be. (It’s code for a very British kind of control.) There is no room for anything that isn’t tradition. The film presents Diana’s bulimia with disarming frankness (it’s an open secret that even Charles makes scornful reference to), but part of the drama of how it’s portrayed is that it’s not just an “eating disorder.” It’s Diana’s way of rejecting the food porn that’s part of what the royals use to numb themselves.

As “Spencer” presents it, Diana is trapped in a loveless marriage to a diffident stick of a man who openly betrays her. Not an uncommon situation. But since she’s one of the royals, she cannot leave him (or so she thinks). She’s effectively imprisoned. She knows she’s supposed to wear the gorgeous pearl necklace that Charles got her, but he also got the same necklace for her — for his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles (who we glimpse outside the church on Christmas morning; she gives Diana a grin of malice). He did it thoughtlessly, not even realizing that anyone would notice. (Unlike Diana, he’s got a pre-media mind.) In her bedroom at the mansion, Diana finds a biography of Anne Boleyn, the wife that Henry VIII accused of adultery and beheaded so that he could marry someone else, and she begins to feel Boleyn as a kindred spirit. Larraín stages a remarkable dinner scene in which Diana takes in the stares of Charles, the Queen, and others who have begun to register that she’s “cracking up.” Their attitude is: How do you solve a problem like Diana? But Diana grabs the pearls around her neck as if the necklace itself were about to execute her. Those pearls are killing her softly.

How will Diana escape? For most of the movie, she has no idea that she can. But an encounter with a scarecrow, nicknamed Bertie, that she remembers from her youth, when she was Diana Spencer, sets off something in her. She goes to visit her old house, which is all boarded up, and she realizes that she was more of herself back then than she is now. That said, in all the conflicts she has with Charles, who is played by Jack Farthing as a man of brutal limitation, there’s one that she’s driven not to compromise on: She does not want her sons to become part of their father’s pheasant-hunting brigade. She says it’s dangerous. She’s right, but the real problem is what she won’t say: that she feels like she’s one of the pheasants, and that the habit of hunting , and the way that it’s linked to the royals’ tradition of “military” discipline (though a real soldier doesn’t get his prey paraded right in front of him), incarnates everything that’s wrong with them.

So the day after Christmas, she drives out to the hunting ground, desperate and defiant, and she becomes that scarecrow. Skewing her arms up in the air, Diana demands that her sons stop hunting. And Stewart makes that the most moving moment I’ve seen in any film this year. Diana isn’t speaking as a royal. She’s speaking as a mother — as the woman she will now be. How will she do it? As the pop song that plays thrillingly during the following sequence tells us, all she needs is a miracle (and maybe a little fast food). She will still be “Diana.” But now she will be herself.

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (In Competition), Sept. 3, 2021. MPAA Rating: Not rated. Running time: 111 MIN.

Production: A NEON/Topic Studios release of a Komplizen Film, Fabula, Shoebox Films production, in association with FilmNation Entertainment. Executive producers: Steven Knight, Tom Quinn, Jeff Deutchman, Christina Zisa, Maria Zuckerman, Ryan Heller, Michael Bloom, Ben Von Dobeneck, Sarah Nagel, Isabell Wigand.
Crew: Director: Pablo Larraín. Screenplay: Steven Knight. Camera: Claire Mathin. Editor: Sebastián Sepúlveda. Music: Jonny Greenwood.
With: Kristen Stewart, Sally Hawkins, Timothy Spall, Sean Harris, Jack Farthing, Jack Nielen, Freddie Spry, Stella Gonet, Richard Sammel, Elizabeth Berrington, Lore Stefanek, Amy Manson.

More From Our Brands

They couldn’t afford taylor swift tickets in america. so they flew to france, a $17.3 million patek philippe minute repeater leads only watch auction, financial services firm broadridge boosts us rowing with job pipeline, the best loofahs and body scrubbers, according to dermatologists, doctor who boss: you should be ‘very’ worried about maestro’s ‘very wrong‘ warning — watch, verify it's you, please log in.

Skip to main content
Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Pop Culture Happy Hour

Performing Arts
Pop Culture

In 'Spencer,' Kristen Stewart's Princess Diana grasps for reality in order to survive

Linda Holmes

Kristen Stewart plays Diana in a very different vision of an imagined moment in her life. Pablo Larraín/Neon hide caption

Kristen Stewart plays Diana in a very different vision of an imagined moment in her life.

Pablo Larraín's Spencer opens with a label that reads, "A fable from a true tragedy." The tragedy, of course, is the story of Diana Spencer, who became Princess of Wales, went through a bitter and public divorce, was largely beloved nevertheless, and lived a short life — at 36, she was literally chased to her death. The fable, on the other hand, is an imagining of a Christmas weekend in the early '90s when her children were young, when a separated but not yet divorced Diana realizes the depth of her own despair and decides to pursue her freedom.

It seems only fair that a woman like Diana, so eagerly drawn by pop culture and so damaged by the ravenous interest in her, would get a chance to be seen through different cinematic lenses. The stage musical about her life that recently debuted on Netflix fails in part because it feels devoid of ideas and perspective, like a filmed Wikipedia page that runs down a checklist of events in her life. Spencer , instead, makes the reasonable assumption that the vast majority of its audience already knows how Diana fit into the family, how she was publicly perceived, how she died, how she was treated. Details are not fussed over or explained: Camilla Parker-Bowles looms large over this story but is not named, because Larraín and Knight assume you know her, you know at least the vague outlines of her history with Charles, and you know how things turned out.

Picture This

A father's day gift from meghan to harry is now a kids' book.

The most obvious precursor to Spencer is Larraín's Jackie , which also studied a few crucial days in the life of one of the world's most famous women: in that case, young Jackie Kennedy in the aftermath of the death of her husband. But while the films share a fondness for footage of women who feel and look lost in enormous, grand spaces, Spencer -- written by Steven Knight — is far less bounded by efforts to be faithful to, or even recreate, reality. Even if Jackie faithfully recreates reality mostly in order to imbue it with unexpected elements of horror or irony (as when Kennedy wanders around hearing "Camelot"), it is careful to make Natalie Portman sound precisely like Kennedy and to have its footage of the White House Christmas tour look precisely as it actually did. It also adopts quite a conventional structure and framing device in the form of a journalist coming to interview Kennedy about these events later.

Spencer is, from that opening title, much more unconventional and almost entirely uninterested in the historical accuracy of any of its details; it is intentionally not real, intentionally a "fable." Other than the roughest outlines of Diana's marriage and the cast of royals who surround her, there's little reason to believe this story is literally true; it is instead meant to feel true, to say something true, and to change the angle through which Diana is seen, from a storybook princess to something closer to a Gothic horror heroine struggling to hang on to her grip on reality as her world tilts. And rather than the interview conceit that Jackie is built around, Spencer opens with a long, beautifully shot, and initially baffling sequence that communicates just how disconnected from a regular person's reality Diana's Christmas weekend is actually going to be.

Buckingham Palace Responds, Piers Morgan Quits After Harry And Meghan Interview

Reality begins to tilt.

We meet Diana, played beautifully by Kristen Stewart, as she drives herself to the Sandringham estate where the royal festivities happen every year. She gets lost and is therefore late, and arriving after the Queen means that she begins the weekend already having erred, already being — as she sees it — in trouble. Confronted with scales on which she must be weighed at the beginning and end of the weekend, offered a series of pre-selected outfits she's meant to wear for everything from meals to church trips, Diana feels not merely micromanaged and limited, but instantly choked by her surroundings, even as she finds refuge in the company of her children.

'Diana, The Musical' mixes camp with sincerity. Here's where every song ranks

But what begins as a straightforward drama begins to tilt as Diana struggles with an eating disorder, a habit of self-harm, and paranoia that the film plays with. Initially this paranoia seems unreasonable, but eventually it seems like it might just be common sense. One of the men who works for the Queen, played by Timothy Spall, is a terrifyingly cold figure who seems to be everywhere at once, and who could have walked directly out of a horror novel that will eventually reveal that he maintains a torture room.

The dread around the story only grows, especially when Diana finds that someone has left a book about Anne Boleyn in her room. She sees parallels between herself and another royal wife who fell out of favor, and clings to her only friend, a dresser named Maggie, played by Sally Hawkins. Maggie's presence and absence affect Diana's sense of safety, both physically and emotionally.

Seeing a different Princess

Diana has so often been seen in popular culture as either a perfect princess or a tragic victim; here, she is a woman trying to be proactive in her own survival, much like the "final girl" in any horror film must be. And while the other royals do speak — there is one fascinating scene between Charles and Diana that beautifully positions them as strategic opponents — they don't do so very often. They mostly hover, they move in and out of frame, and they are often out of focus and effectively anonymous on an individual level. Their personhood isn't terribly relevant to Diana by this point in her life; they exist as monsters, or at least as threats. They play the role of ghosts or whistling winds here, more than as characters with whom she interacts.

Princes William And Harry Say BBC Interview Led To Princess Diana's Divorce And Death

It's not even just Gothic horror that Larraín seems to be referencing, though; echoes shift throughout. There is — and honestly, there also was in Jackie — a bit of The Shining , here in the way Diana seems at times to be lost in the long corridors of the house, seeing things that might not actually be there, feeling that her mere presence is sapping her of sanity. There's some of the stiffness of upstairs-downstairs royal tales. There's even a bit of the '70s paranoid thriller and the '90s trenchcoat thriller: Spall is part horror, yes, but he's also part ominous company man, like the one who lingers at the edges of most John Grisham books, making grave pronouncements about what might happen to those who go against power. A scene in which he warns Diana while out on the grounds of the estate looks a lot like scenes in which FBI agents or mysterious operatives walk around the National Mall with their collars pulled up, telling people not to talk.

The design does great work here — the grand halls, the spooky beauty, the dated outfits and familiar dresses — as does the score from Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. Greenwood is a prolific film composer, and has a particularly deft touch with what might be called the grandly unsettling: The Master, There Will Be Blood , and particularly Phantom Thread , for which he earned an Oscar nomination. The score is sometimes traditionally orchestral, sometimes discordant and creepy, and smart about touches like jazz-inflected horns that instantly shift the mood.

Kristen Stewart's Diana

While her take on Diana's voice rang true enough to my American ear, Stewart wisely doesn't spend a lot of time physically recreating Diana with precision — with one exception. Early on, when Diana is lost, she stops at a small café to ask for directions. As she walks through the crowd, which recognizes her and stares in silent awe, Stewart briefly casts her eyes down at the floor and smiles just a bit. That moment is so very reminiscent of the real Diana that it creates a bond between actor and real person that survives even the most reality-bending moments in the story.

Her performance here is powerful, and it carries this version of Diana through such instability as a character (is she right to be afraid? is she losing her grip on reality?), but she always seems like the same person, the same good mother who doesn't know how to begin to separate herself from the life she's walked into. She is asked to do big things, grand things, genre horror things, but she never tips over into caricature.

Martin Bashir Apologizes, But Denies His BBC Interview Harmed Princess Diana

The obvious question about any Diana project at this point is whether it has anything to add to the massive amount of cultural material about her that already exists. By the end of her life, she had told her own story in her own words quite a bit. But the point of Spencer seems to be not to reveal Diana the real person, but to treat her differently in a cinematic sense — to recast her in a different kind of movie than the ones that we've already seen. And, perhaps ironically, to use horror to imagine an ending for her that's less horrifying.

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Upcoming Movies and TV shows
Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

What's the Tomatometer®?
Login/signup

Movies in theaters

Opening this week
Top box office
Coming soon to theaters
Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

Fandango at Home
Netflix streaming
Prime Video
Most popular streaming movies
What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Link to Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
The Fall Guy Link to The Fall Guy
The Last Stop in Yuma County Link to The Last Stop in Yuma County

New TV Tonight

Doctor Who: Season 1
Blood of Zeus: Season 2
Pretty Little Liars: Summer School: Season 2
Black Twitter: A People's History: Season 1
Dark Matter: Season 1
Bodkin: Season 1
Hollywood Con Queen: Season 1
The Chi: Season 6
Reginald the Vampire: Season 2
Love Undercover: Season 1

Where to Watch

Watch Spencer with a subscription on Hulu, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.

What to Know

Spencer can frustrate with its idiosyncratic depiction of its subject's life, but Kristen Stewart's finely modulated performance anchors the film's flights of fancy.

Kristen Stewart is great in Spencer , but viewers expecting a traditional -- or even clear -- picture of Diana's life are likely to come away disappointed.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Pablo Larraín

Kristen Stewart

Sally Hawkins

Timothy Spall

Major Alistar Gregory

Sean Harris

Jack Farthing

More Like This

Movie news & guides, this movie is featured in the following articles..

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors.

Now streaming on:

Pablo Larraín ’s “Spencer” is a haunting reimagining of a tense Christmas holiday in the life of Princess Diana. Knowing this will not fully prepare you for what you’re about to watch. Larraín’s vision is full of dream sequences, internal and externalized pain, metaphor-heavy dialogue, and Kristen Stewart brooding sensationally under various hats and Diana’s signature short bob haircut. The movie aims to place the audience in its heroine’s state of mind as much as it wants to capture the sense of time of the early '90s and that point in the royal relationship when things begin to disintegrate.

Written by Steven Knight , “Spencer” greets its audience with a word: “A fable from a true tragedy,” setting the tone that what we’re about to see is more fiction than fact. Princess Diana (Stewart) is late to the beginning of holiday festivities. She gets lost in the area where she grew up as neighbors to the royal family, a symbol of how she’s lost parts of herself over the years trying to live up to expectations. Once on royal grounds, she’s greeted by a stern-faced former military officer ( Timothy Spall ), who’s the eyes and ears of the family. There’s nothing she can do without his knowledge. Now reunited with her boys William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry), Diana tries to put on a brave face even if she knows her husband Prince Charles ( Jack Farthing ) is having an affair. Her anxiety and depression start to get the better of her. She begins to see the ghost of Anne Boleyn ( Amy Manson ), the one-time wife of Henry the VIII who was beheaded so her husband could marry his mistress, as an omen for what will be done to her. Diana finds an ally among her staff in Maggie ( Sally Hawkins ), but even she is pulled away just when Diana needs her the most. Robbed of her privacy outside and inside the opulent estate, the walls feel as if they were closing in on Diana as she loses her grip on reality until she can break out and save herself.

As of late, Larraín seems fascinated by women held captive by societal cages and how they find an escape route. There was Natalie Portman ’s tear and bloodstained performance as the First Lady in “ Jackie ” back in 2016. Then, most recently, his sexually-charged drama “ Ema ” found a street dancer breaking with convention, polite society and her choreographer turned controlling romantic partner. “Spencer” shares a lot with “Jackie,” namely the stifling demands made on famous women in designer clothes and grand homes. They may appear to the outside world as having it all, but the reality is much sadder: their cages are gilded, but still a cage.

The latest addition to that cage is Kristen Stewart as a moody Diana, a performance that will likely be divisive among the princess’ defenders. The accent feels hit or miss, as do some of her actions. At times, it seems as if the movie reduces her to a childish state, throwing a fit after being denied her choices to do much else. Knight’s dialogue may be at times blunt and surface-level, and too often doesn’t give Stewart enough much room for nuance. Much of her performance can be described as a doomed brooding or a royal “ Melancholia ,” unable to pull herself out of that state until she finds a way out of the royals’ clutches.

Larraín’s vision isn’t a straightforward interpretation of the princess’s displeasure with traditions and holiday pageantry. There are sequences with Anne Boleyn that come across pretty heavy-handed, but perhaps the audience’s first hint that this is not your typical biopic is during the first dinner, when a displeased Diana is sickened by the pearls she’s forced to wear by her husband—a set of pearls she knows was also given to his mistress—so she snaps the necklace, sending the pearls all around her, including into her pea soup. Then she proceeds to eat one of the pearls, cracking them painfully with her teeth before the next shot of her running away in pain. Now, the imagined eating of the pearls can be interpreted a number of ways, but the pain of suffering through a dinner with her cheating husband across the table does physically affect her. The blending of her anguish, real and imagined, is intended to keep the audience uneasy and it succeeds.

In order to immerse the audience in Diana’s dissolving mental state, Larraín enlisted composer Jonny Greenwood to create the increasingly unnerving soundtrack, which includes everything from high-pitched strings to the clinking of glass chimes, to demonstrate Diana’s overwhelming experience. Cinematographer extraordinaire Claire Mathon (“ Portrait of a Lady on Fire ,” “ Atlantics ”) recreates a somewhat-faded look of photographs from the era, visually matching the scenery and costumes.

Near the end of the movie, a fashion flashback revisits Diana in earlier days of her youth, in some of her most famous outfits, like her wedding gown. This sequence happens after her having been denied going back to her childhood home. She goes anyway and looks at the ruins of her lost girlhood. It is a dizzying moment, created by Larraín and Mathon to look like a fashion shoot out of a cadre of outfits designed by Jacqueline Durran . Guy Hendrix Dyas ’ production design of the royal’s holiday home is the most literal interpretation of Larraín’s idea of a gilded cage. It is rich in detail and steeped in grandiosity. Yet when Diana and her boys complain it’s cold, no one dares turn the heat up to accommodate their requests. It’s just another metaphor in this decadent fairy tale inspired by the public’s ongoing fascination with a woman who never had much time in life to enjoy her days outside of her gilded cage.

This review was filed in conjunction with the Telluride Film Festival on September 5th. It is now exclusively in theaters.

Monica Castillo

Monica Castillo is a critic, journalist, programmer, and curator based in New York City. She is the Senior Film Programmer at the Jacob Burns Film Center and a contributor to RogerEbert.com .

Now playing

The Listener

Matt zoller seitz.

Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg

Marya e. gates.

The Roundup: Punishment

Simon abrams.

Sheila O'Malley

Sweet Dreams

Glenn Kenny

Film credits.

Spencer (2021)

111 minutes

Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana

Sean Harris as Chief Darren

Jack Farthing as Prince Charles

Sally Hawkins as Maggie

Timothy Spall as Major Gregory

Amy Manson as Anne Boleyn

Pablo Larraín
Steven Knight

Cinematographer

Claire Mathon
Sebastián Sepúlveda
Jonny Greenwood

Latest blog posts

The 10 Most Anticipated Films of Cannes 2024

The Importance of Connections in Ryusuke Hamaguchi Films

Saving Film History One Frame at a Time: A Preview of Restored & Rediscovered Series at the Jacob Burns Film Center

The Beatles Were Never More Human Than in ‘Let It Be’

Cast & crew
User reviews

Diana Spencer, struggling with mental-health problems during her Christmas holidays with the Royal Family at their Sandringham estate in Norfolk, England, decides to end her decade-long marr... Read all Diana Spencer, struggling with mental-health problems during her Christmas holidays with the Royal Family at their Sandringham estate in Norfolk, England, decides to end her decade-long marriage to Prince Charles. Diana Spencer, struggling with mental-health problems during her Christmas holidays with the Royal Family at their Sandringham estate in Norfolk, England, decides to end her decade-long marriage to Prince Charles.

Pablo Larraín
Steven Knight
Kristen Stewart
Timothy Spall
Sally Hawkins
1K User reviews
313 Critic reviews
76 Metascore
47 wins & 134 nominations total

Major Alistar Gregory

Prince Philip

Princess Anne
Queen Mother

Anne Boleyn

Footman Paul

Angela (Dresser)

Maria (Older Maid)

Pamela (Maid)

Michael (Charles' Valet)
Barbara (Nanny)
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

How Kristen Stewart Nailed Princess Di's Accent

More like this

Did you know

Trivia Princess Diana's former bodyguard Ken Wharfe on Stewart's performance: "Out of all the people who have played Diana over the past 10 years, she's the closest to her. She managed to perfect her mannerisms."
Goofs The licence plate of Diana's car changes from a G plate to a J plate in the first five minutes of the film. Is seen again towards the end and changes from J when it is first seen again and then it changes back to G again.

Diana : Will they kill me, do you think?

Crazy credits A Fable From A True Tragedy
Connections Edited into Amanda the Jedi Show: Faster than your First Time Reviews 2 - Best and Worst of TIFF 2021 (2021)
Soundtracks All I need is a Miracle Written by Christopher Neil and Mike Rutherford Performed by Mike + The Mechanics Published by Hit & Run Music (Publishing) Ltd. and Concord Music Publishing LLC Courtesy of Michael Rutherford Limited Under License to BMG Rights Management Ltd.

Technical specs

Runtime 1 hour 57 minutes

More to explore

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

Kristen stewart in princess diana biopic ‘spencer’: film review | venice 2021.

Director Pablo Larraín, who upended the conventions of the genre with ‘Jackie,’ examines another iconic woman in crisis, this time as the last illusions of her fairy-tale marriage crumble.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

Share this article on Facebook
Share this article on Twitter
Share this article on Flipboard
Share this article on Email
Show additional share options
Share this article on Linkedin
Share this article on Pinit
Share this article on Reddit
Share this article on Tumblr
Share this article on Whatsapp
Share this article on Print
Share this article on Comment

Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in 'Spencer'

Any film in which a woman who left an indelible mark on the popular culture of the late 20th century finds comfort in the ghost of Anne Boleyn is unlikely to be your grandparents’ Princess Diana biopic. Pablo Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight ’s audaciously original Spencer reins in its tight focus to a three-day Christmas weekend at Queen Elizabeth II’s Sandringham estate in Norfolk in the early ‘90s, when the sham of Diana’s marriage to Prince Charles had become unendurable. Billed as “a fable from a true tragedy,” this is a speculative study of a woman in extremis, played by an incandescent Kristen Stewart .

Chilean director Larraín’s transfixing 2016 English-language debut, Jackie , trained its emotionally penetrating lens on Jacqueline Kennedy reeling in the shell-shocked wake of her husband’s assassination. While it has a similar raw intimacy, his new film, by contrast, examines another woman in the public eye as she faces the inevitability of an escalating crisis, anticipating the harsh glare of a spotlight that has already scorched her on multiple occasions.

Full credits

Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition) Cast: Kristen Stewart, Sally Hawkins, Timothy Spall, Sean Harris, Jack Farthing, Jack Nielen, Freddie Spry, Stella Gonet, Richard Sammel, Elizabeth Berrington, Lore Stefanek, Amy Manson, Laura Benson, Wendy Patterson, Emma Darwall-Smith Distributor: Neon/Topic Studios Production companies: Komplizen Film, Fabula, Shoebox Films, in association with FilmNation Entertainment Director: Pablo Larraín Screenwriter: Steven Knight Producers: Juan de Dios Larraín , Jonas Dornbach, Paul Webster, Janine Jackowski, Maren Ade, Pablo Larraín Executive producers: Steven Knight, Tom Quinn, Jeff Deutchman, Christina Zisa, Maria Zuckerman, Ryan Heller, Michael Bloom, Ben Von Dobeneck, Sarah Nagel, Isabell Wiegand Director of photography: Claire Mathon Production designer: Guy Hendrix Dyas Costume designer: Jacqueline Durran Editor: Sebastián Sepúlveda Music: Jonny Greenwood Casting: Amy Hubbard

THR Newsletters

More from The Hollywood Reporter

‘star wars’: sigourney weaver in talks to join ‘the mandalorian & grogu’, ’28 years later’ set for 2025 release date from sony, ‘the fall guy’ writer drew pearce talks that a-list cameo and the ‘mission: impossible’ death he considered, ‘godzilla x kong’ follow-up enlists ‘shang chi’ scribe dave callaham to write (exclusive), jerry seinfeld wanted chris rock to parody will smith oscars slap in ‘unfrosted’, jeff bridges, dave bautista to star in live-action monster movie ‘grendel’ from jim henson company.

Kristen Stewart in a clunky jacket and huge tulle skirt, seen from a long distance and outlined against a window in Spencer

Filed under:

The Kristen Stewart movie Spencer is more real-life horror story than Princess Di biopic

It’s more about haunting impressions and emotions than specific history

Share this story

Share this on Facebook
Share this on Reddit
Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: The Kristen Stewart movie Spencer is more real-life horror story than Princess Di biopic

This Spencer review was originally published in conjunction with the film’s screening at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival. It has been updated for the film’s theatrical release on Nov. 5.

The Princess Diana biopic Spencer isn’t your prototypical biographical film. Then again, the film’s director, Chilean auteur Pablo Larraín, isn’t known for making familiar biopics, either. His depictions of Jackie Kennedy’s life after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Jackie , and poet Pablo Neruda on the run from new Chilean president Gabriel González Videla in Neruda , are raw, unflinching films that focus closely on a specific moment in their subjects’ lives.

Likewise with Spencer , Larraín doesn’t provide the expected Princess Diana story. There’s no courtship or fairy-tale wedding, à la The Crown. It doesn’t chart her life from being a newborn fated for greater heights. Nor does it affix her as a predictably doomed victim. Instead, Spencer takes place during a Christmas weekend in 1991, at the Queen’s Sandringham estate. Diana (Kristen Stewart) is still in a fraught marriage with Prince Charles (a cold Jack Farthing), or at least partially. During her stay, Diana contends with her role as a mother to her two sons, William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry), and faces her eating disorder, her family’s history, and the domineering men who script her daily life.

Opening with a title card reading “A fable from a true story,” Larraín’s film isn’t based on a wholly true event. Nor does it want to tell Diana’s life story. Spencer is an act of psychological horror, a kind of ghost story, and a survivalist picture carried by an uncannily immersive Kristen Stewart, in the best performance of her career.

Stephen Knight’s script doesn’t bang viewers over the head with the media-constructed people’s princess mythos. Knight and Larraín are too smart to use such easy tools. Instead, they find subtler ways to weave her legend into a realistic narrative. Spencer opens with Diana, without a chauffeur or bodyguard, driving herself to Sandringham House. The confident royal loses her way, ultimately deciding to stop to ask for directions. In front of normal folks, she assumes a shy, somewhat vulnerable disposition. Her eyes swing skyward as her head tilts to the side. The scene is the first contour in Stewart’s layered portrayal of her: the differences between the private princess and the public-facing one.

This is a biopic acutely concerned with parsing Diana’s psychology, and specifically, her many demons. But not in a salacious way. While heading to Sandringham Estate, she sees a scarecrow standing in the middle of a field, wearing her father’s red coat. (In real life, her father, John Spencer, died three months after that Christmas, of a heart attack.) She goes to retrieve the outerwear, hoping to have it cleaned. Diana grew up on the Queen’s estate in Park House, making her journey to the Christmas festivities both a heartening homecoming and an unfortunate duty, causing a wellspring of grief to affect her in varying fashions.

Diana also connects with her ancestry in the film. Equerry Major Gregory (a punchable Timothy Spall), a craggy Scottish war veteran who now narcs for the Queen, pesters Diana to conform to tradition. One “game” has visitors weigh themselves at the beginning on arrival, to see who gains the most weight over the holidays. This tradition causes Diana’s insecurities with her weight to bubble to the surface. And after she finds a book about Anne Boleyn on her bed, possibly placed there by Major Gregory, she dreams of the distant relative, the second wife of Henry VIII, who was beheaded after he falsely accused her of adultery. Between the coat and the spirit of Anne Boleyn, Diana is drawn toward her now-condemned childhood home.

Who can blame Diana for feeling locked-in? Other than her tailor and best friend Maggie (Sally Hawkins), and the estate’s sympathetic chef Darren (Sean Harris), she’s pretty much isolated. But once again, Larraín is too smart to limit Spencer to honing in on Diana’s relationship with the other royals around her, or even her relationship with Charles and his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles. Instead, he pulls focus by depicting how Diana is trying to protect her sons from the royals’ archaic, closed-off traditions. But in the face of domineering men like Charles and Major Gregory, along with the unbending protocol of the estate and her eating disorder, she can barely protect herself. The mania she feels makes her Christmas holiday more of a fight for survival than a getaway.

Jonny Greenwood’s score opens as classically British, then morphs into an unnerving symphony. Following a similar aesthetic to Jackie , cinematographer Claire Mathon ( Atlantics , Portrait of a Lady on Fire ) captures Diana with intrusive close-ups, her lens peering over the princess’ heart-rending facial expressions. Mathon also takes great interest in the disturbingly manicured features of the estate: the uniform garden, the exacting movements by the austere servants, and the meticulously prepared food and clothes, which contrast with Diana’s freefall. Meanwhile, the costume work by the legendary Jacqueline Durran covers a greatest-hits of Diana’s best-known outfits, with an evocative array of fashions that often speaks toward her mental state.

Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart) sits on the floor between two beds with her children William and Harry in Spencer

But Stewart’s absolutely outstanding performance is what pulls together Diana’s lore and Larraín’s conception of her, creating a fleshed-out version of the princess that isn’t reliant on broad or showy instincts. Stewart folds in her body to actualize Diana’s nervousness, tips her head in a familiar way, and gets the princess’ voice pitch-perfect. But beyond that, her performance comes down to the eyes. Stewart’s eyes swing like switchblades through the grass. And each glance claims another victim, displaying either a kind of forlornness or a shyness, depending on the situation. It’s her eyes that jump her over the line of performance to a totally lived-in aura. There’s never a moment where it’s Kristen Stewart as Diana. She is Diana.

The film has two climaxes, and one comes when Diana finally makes it back to her childhood home. She’s frantic and hallucinating, and Mathon’s camera closes even more perilously into her. This is where Jackie editor Sebastián Sepúlveda shines, providing a vivid and haunting montage of her life leading up to the moment. The other climax flips the tenor of the film from grim to celebratory. Considering the gloominess of the film, and how deep into despair it descends, the quick upshot toward revelry should feel maudlin, almost like Larraín is cheating against history. But it works, because the director knows the audience has an inherent desire for Diana to have a happy ending.

In that sense, Larraín’s Spencer , an inspired portrait of the princess’ life that’s more concerned with finding new truths in her public and private persona than following the familiar beats of her life, isn’t the classic biopic audiences are used to watching. But it is the inventive, iconoclastic film Diana deserves.

Spencer will arrive in American theaters on Nov. 5, 2021.

‘Spencer’ Film Review: Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana Makes for a Brilliant and Silly Drama

Chilean director Pablo Larrain’s film has the potential to become a gothic, almost camp classic

Kristen Stewart in Spencer Princess Diana

This review of “Spencer” was first published on Sept. 3 after the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

Self-billed as “a fable from a true tragedy,” Pablo Larrain’s “Spencer,” which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Friday, homes in on the unraveling of Diana, Princess of Wales, over three bitter days around Christmas in the Queen’s country house at Sandringham in Norfolk. Hinging (or unhinging) on a major performance from Kristen Stewart, the movie itself unfurls in a torrent of ideas and madness, some of it brilliant, some of it quite silly.

Chilean director Larrain came to international prominence with excellent films commenting on the effect of the disturbing and violent politics of the Pinochet regime in his country — and just as he skewered the myth of Kennedy’s Camelot in his 2016 Venice film “Jackie,” with Natalie Portman, he doesn’t spare the British establishment here. He depicts the royal court as a place of ruthless treachery dressed up in eccentricity and tradition, with Diana as the latest in a long line of victims that runs all the way back to Anne Boleyn.

How true any of it is will concern as many people as it delights, particularly in the U.K. But Larrain, working from Steven Knight’s script, is clearly going for something more classical here than can be found in an episode of the giant Netflix series “The Crown.” “Spencer” creates an intense, giddy spectacle with Shakespearean or indeed Racinian ambitions.

It begins on Christmas Eve in the early 1990s, as Sandringham prepares for the arrival of the royal party. A prominent notice in the kitchen warns workers they should “Keep the Noise to a Minimum: They Can Hear You,” and the notion of the walls having ears and eyes is a constant, perhaps over-stressed, theme of the film.

princess diana Naomi Watts, Emma Corrin, Kristen Stewart (

Diana herself is driving up in a racing green Porsche and gets lost, stopping to ask directions in a local greasy-spoon cafe (fish and chips cost £2.70) where the diners and staff soon fall silent and agape at their illustrious visitor.

It is of course an early metaphor for Diana’s more existential sense of loss as she heads to the palace accompanied by a dissonant trumpet score, composer Jonny Greenwood twisting the traditional sounds of heraldry into something creepy and unsettling. Larrain’s overhead shot of Diana’s approach turns Sandringham into a haunted house, or the Overlook Hotel from “The Shining,” rather than a royal residence. With its all-seeing walls and freezing rooms, it’s a place that will send the Princess into a frenzy with its rules and customs and silences.

Diana is stalked by visions of Anne Boleyn (from whom the Spencer family are distantly descended) and she’s compelled to read a tome about Henry VIII’s beheaded wife when she finds it placed in her rooms. These apparitions are startling yet also faintly ridiculous, although in her fragile performance, Stewart always sells them to the audience.

While there are some notable supporting roles for Timothy Spall, Sean Harris and Sally Hawkins, it’s Stewart’s film. She gets the doe-eyed, pitying tilt of the head and the little posh girl voice down pretty well, but this is no impression — it’s more an interpretation of a classic role, bringing layers of real human complexity to a figure who, for all the mythology that surrounds her, still looms large in the British and global conscience.

This Diana isn’t the likable People’s Princess or Queen of Hearts whom the public adored. We get none of that. Instead, she’s prickly, self-absorbed and self-pitying, spoiled and brattish; but while the cold seeps into every room, we do warm to her obvious affection for her children and their love for her.

Larrain does open up his shots for some of the dinner scenes and the below-stairs bustle, but he prefers to return to claustrophobic close-ups, like mini-plays within the main drama. There’s a tender, candlelit scene with Diana and her boys (Jack Nielen as William, Freddie Spry as a cute, confused Harry) pretending to be her soldiers; several tense exchanges with Spall’s threatening, controlling equerry; and trusting confessions with her favorite dresser, Maggie, played by Hawkins.

“This dress doesn’t fit,” she tells Maggie, who lays out a prescribed outfit (props to Jacqueline Durran’s superb costume work) for each occasion, from breakfast to church to dinner. “Have you tried it on?” asks the dresser. “No,” says the Princess. “I mean it doesn’t fit my mood.”

The dialogue is rather on-the-nose, and practically every sentence feels aware of itself as a pronouncement of era-defining depth and acuity. “Beauty is useless, beauty is clothing”; “There is no future here, only past and present’; “I watch to make sure others do not see.”

And there are some scenes that risk teetering into unintentional comedy, such as the fantasy sequence of Diana’s pearls falling into her green soup, which she will rush off and vomit into the royal downstairs loo. There’s a conversation with Spall in a huge fridge, surrounded by cakes and hams and bits of chicken; the corgis filing out of their own Rolls Royce; the family gathered round the telly to watch the Queen’s Christmas Speech; and perhaps the less said the better about a scene with Diana talking to one of the royal pheasants (“beautiful birds but not too bright”) and envying its plumage because “you can always wear the same outfit.”

There are precious few grace notes here, nothing to endear this flailing princess to us and practically no interaction with anyone else in the family, apart from a couple of withering observations from Stella Gonet’s Queen Elizabeth. There is a chilling showdown with Jack Farthing’s Prince Charles, the couple separated by the length of a snooker table, accusing each other of “being delayed by someone” in reference to their mutual infidelities. Diana, throughout, is particularly upset that he has given the same pearl necklace Christmas present to “her,” meaning of course his longtime mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles.

Far from the laughable disaster of Oliver Hirshbiegel’s 2013 “Diana” starring Naomi Watts, Larrain’s “Spencer” will cause a sensation yet has also plenty of craft to admire, in Greenwood’s swirling and tumultuous score and Claire Mathon’s textured cinematography, here framing what you could call another portrait of a lady on fire.

With its Grand Guignol and horror movie tropes, Spencer is probably more fun than a somber festival premiere can allow it to be. And despite the high seriousness (even the taboo) of it for many, it could well grow into a gothic, almost camp classic. It’s certainly a royal biopic like no other and, losing her head like Anne Boleyn before her, Kristen Stewart gives it her all.

2 responses to “‘Spencer’ Film Review: Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana Makes for a Brilliant and Silly Drama”

HuVCLYikmyxRbh

udOmTizZXkQRqf

Spencer First Reviews: Kristen Stewart is “Mesmerizing” in Princess Diana Biopic That’s More Shining than The Crown

Critics out of the venice film festival say pablo larraín’s latest is a poetic, eerie “masterpiece” – or a potential camp classic, perhaps – that makes a perfect companion piece to his jackie ..

TAGGED AS: Awards , Awards Tour , Drama , festivals , movies , venice

(Photo by NEON)

One of the most intriguing biopics in years, Spencer stars American actress Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana, a world-famous figure who has already been portrayed many times before (including recently in the acclaimed fourth season of The Crown ). This time, Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín is at the helm and the first reviews out of the Venice Film Festival are praising Spencer as a fitting companion to his Jackie Kennedy film starring Natalie Portman, Jackie . Could this be another major Oscar contender? That’s a good possibility. But this is also another artsy portrait that may not hold a broad enough appeal to enthrall all fans of Stewart, Diana, or stories involving the British throne in general.

Here’s what critics are saying about Spencer :

How is Kristen Stewart’s portrayal of Diana?

“I can’t say enough about Stewart’s performance…it is a bracing, bitter, moving, and altogether stunning turn, taking Diana down roads we have not seen played out quite like in this mesmerizing portrayal.” – Pete Hammond, Deadline Hollywood Daily

“Kristen Stewart doesn’t just do an impersonation (though on the level of impersonation she’s superb). She transforms; she changes her aspect, her rhythm, her karma.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“This is no impression — it’s more an interpretation of a classic role, bringing layers of real human complexity.” – Jason Solomons, The Wrap

“She gives an awkward and mannered performance as Diana, and this is entirely as it should be when one considers that Diana gave an awkward and mannered performance herself.” – Xan Brooks, Guardian

“Casting Stewart, another reserved celebrity who knows the obsessive, overbearing glare of fandom better than most, is inspired… it’s a wry, empathetic evocation of a woman somehow locked out of both her inner and outer lives, frozen in the corridor.” – Guy Lodge, Film of the Week

“Her most riveting performance since Personal Shopper .” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Are there any standouts in the supporting roles?

“Sally Hawkins is very fine and hits just the right notes in [her] role…[Jack] Farthing manages to nail the tightly controlled Charles, but does show flashes of a human being eventually.” – Pete Hammond, Deadline Hollywood Daily

“Hawkins brings great warmth as Maggie, Diana’s sole ally in this twitchily mistrustful place.” – Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph (UK)

How does the movie compare to Jackie ?

“Like Larraín’s earlier film Jackie , in which Natalie Portman starred as JFK’s grieving wife, this is a self-consciously poetic and elegiac affair.” – Geoffrey Macnab, Independent (UK)

“Spencer is a movie made very much in the spirit of Larraín’s Jackie …every bit as good; it may be even better.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“As in Larraín’s equally brilliant, surprising Jackie , to which Spencer is an intricately attuned companion piece, the director thrills in presenting a public icon freed of her public, unsure how to act around herself.” – Guy Lodge, Film of the Week

“ Spencer is something else indeed…a more accessible approach in some ways, but also more ambitious.” – Pete Hammond, Deadline Hollywood Daily

“Unlike the maelstrom of emotions in Larain’s previous, and similarly-calibrated celebrity portrait pic, Jackie , this one is slower, linear and more austere, better to fit the genteel and regimented-to-death context of a Yuletide with Her Majesty.” – David Jenkins, Little White Lies

Is Spencer better than past Princess Diana biopics?

“A considerable upgrade on the ill-fated 2014 biopic in which Naomi Watts played Diana.” – Geoffrey Macnab, Independent (UK)

“Far from the laughable disaster of Oliver Hirshbiegel’s 2013 Diana starring Naomi Watts, Larrain’s Spencer will cause a sensation…it’s certainly a royal biopic like no other.” – Jason Solomons, The Wrap

“We have seen many takes on Diana…but Larrain has something very different, very intimate, and very revealing in mind here.” – Pete Hammond, Deadline Hollywood Daily

Will it please fans of The Crown ?

“This is a long way from the more decorous treatment of Netflix’s The Crown .” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“This isn’t The Crown, it is far more insular, an intimate portrait of a woman trying to save herself.” – Pete Hammond, Deadline Hollywood Daily

“A more daring alternative to Netflix’s popular show The Crown , Spencer tries, and largely succeeds, to get under Diana’s skin.” – James Mottram, South China Morning Post

“Larrain, working from Steven Knight’s script, is clearly going for something more classical here than can be found in an episode of the giant Netflix series The Crown .” – Jason Solomons, The Wrap

“ Spencer , the eerie, witty and quite extraordinary film that has resulted from their persistence, isn’t necessarily for fans of The Crown , or fetishists of royal ritual and ceremony.” – Guy Lodge, Film of the Week

“Unlike The Crown, there is no risk whatsoever of Pablo Larraín’s resplendently mad, sad and beautiful Spencer …being mistaken for historical fact.” – Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph (UK)

Is there a particular classic film it will remind us of?

“Larrain’s overhead shot of Diana’s approach turns Sandringham into a haunted house, or the Overlook Hotel from The Shining , rather than a royal residence.” – Jason Solomons, The Wrap

“Larraín makes the place look as spooky as Kubrick’s hotel in The Shining .” – Xan Brooks, Guardian

“Larraín places Di in this luxe getaway palace as if he were making a royal version of The Shining .” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“Not for nothing do the long, depopulated hallways of Sandringham occasionally call the Overlook Hotel to mind.” – Guy Lodge, Film of the Week

“The film recalls both Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette , in its elegantly decked-out dissection of cloistered entitlement, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining .” – David Jenkins, Little White Lies

How is the screenplay?

“The script, by Steven Knight, creates its own alluring cleverness. It’s there in Diana’s dialogue, which consists of her spewing out observations, to others but almost to herself, with a kind of rueful mockery.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“The dialogue is rather on-the-nose, and practically every sentence feels aware of itself as a pronouncement of era-defining depth and acuity.” – Jason Solomons, The Wrap

“Occasionally Knight’s dialogue is on the nose…but Stewart sells even those awkward missteps.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“The script by Steven Knight is problematic from the get-go, packed with lots of winking pop psychology and on-the-nose portent, and clearly written with future tragedy in mind.” – David Jenkins, Little White Lies

Is it funny?

“There’s even time for a little humor, from a line about masturbation to an airing of a classic Mike and the Mechanics track.” – James Mottram, South China Morning Post

“There are some scenes that risk teetering into unintentional comedy…it could well grow into a gothic, almost camp classic.” – Jason Solomons, The Wrap

“Veers wildly from moments of dreamy intrigue to risible scenes of camp.” – Kevin Maher, Times (UK)

How does the movie look?

“Mathon’s camerawork is ravishing, constantly in motion, gliding behind and circling a subject who bristles at being under constant surveillance.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“The remarkable production design, by Guy Hendrix Dyas, turns the interiors of Sandringham into a profusion of textures that dance before our eyes.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“Jacqueline Durran’s costumes are particularly exquisite.” – James Mottram, South China Morning Post

How is the score?

“Composer Jonny Greenwood [twists] the traditional sounds of heraldry into something creepy and unsettling.” – Jason Solomons, The Wrap

“The music by Jonny Greenwood is as bracing and risky as anything else in Larraín’s film, shifting from melodic piano and string themes early on into discordant free-form jazz or oppressive pipe organ passages as Diana’s self-possession unravels.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Jonny Greenwood’s ominous jazzy score seems to have a direct pipeline to Diana’s emotions.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“Jonny Greenwood’s brilliant but sometimes heavy-handed score which deftly combines prim, dinnertime minuettes with clanging atonal dirges.” – David Jenkins, Little White Lies

“Absolutely-should-be-Oscar-winning.” – Jessica Kiang, The Playlist

Does the Royal Family come off looking badly?

“Larraín largely holds back on characterizing the other royals…” – James Mottram, South China Morning Post

“There is no question the film firmly lands on the side of Diana… [it’s] a humorless, stiff, and dreary picture of Royal life that seems about as life less as possible.” – Pete Hammond, Deadline Hollywood Daily

“While some will no doubt reject Spencer as lurid psychodrama, the presentation of the royal family as a sinister body corporate, ready to inflict wounds and ice out any interloper who tarnishes their brand is chillingly compelling.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“It is an understatement to say that many living royals – including the current regent – do not come off well in this film.” – David Jenkins, Little White Lies

“No doubt it took an outsider to make a film that’s as un-reverential as Spencer , which dares to examine the royals as if they were specimens under glass.” – Xan Brooks, Guardian

“All the right people are going to hate Spencer . That’s just how good it is.” – Jessica Kiang, The Playlist

Will anyone have an issue with its historical or physical accuracy?

“This is a film in which the essence of the characters is given more weight than the actors’ resemblance to them.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“The film is bound to infuriate traditionalists. Larraín and Knight have taken huge liberties with their subject matter.” – Geoffrey Macnab, Independent (UK)

“Entirely to its credit, Spencer is nothing like real history, and its Diana can certainly not be proven to be anything like the real Diana, whoever that poor woman was.” – Jessica Kiang, The Playlist

What one or two words are best to describe the movie?

“Masterpiece.” – Jessica Kiang, The Playlist

“Magnificent.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“Extraordinary.” – Xan Brooks, Guardian

“Audaciously original.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Brilliantly imagined.” – Pete Hammond, Deadline Hollywood Daily

“Infuriating.” – Kevin Maher, Times (UK)

“Sad and hopeless.” – David Jenkins, Little White Lies

Spencer is in theaters from Friday November 5, 2021.

On an Apple device? Follow Rotten Tomatoes on Apple News .

Related News

Owen Teague and Wes Ball Break Down a Scene From Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes First Reviews: A Thoughtful, Visually Stunning, Action-Packed Triumph

Furiosa First Reactions: Brutal, Masterful, and Absolutely Epic

8 Things To Know About The New Season Of Doctor Who

TV Premiere Dates 2024

Renewed and Cancelled TV Shows 2024

Movie & TV News

Featured on rt.

Rotten Tomatoes Predicts the 2024 Emmy Nominations

May 10, 2024

100 Best Movies on Tubi (May 2024)

The Best Shows on Amazon Prime Video to Watch Right Now (May 2024)

66 Best Baseball Movies of All Time

Top Headlines

100 Best Movies on Tubi (May 2024) –
The Best Shows on Amazon Prime Video to Watch Right Now (May 2024) –
66 Best Baseball Movies of All Time –
The 100 Best Movies on Amazon Prime Video (May 2024) –
Planet of the Apes In Order: How to Watch the Movies Chronologically –
Planet of the Apes Movies Ranked by Tomatometer –

Review: Pablo Larrain's brilliant 'Spencer' unleashes a royally wonderful Kristen Stewart

With a stellar performance from Kristen Stewart , director Pablo Larraín’s supremely brilliant “Spencer” is an enlightening glimpse into the mind of Princess Diana that doubles as an effective horror film. Rooted in a holiday setting, it also splendidly captures moments of absolute joy and exuberance even amid a sad larger narrative.

Labeled “a fable from true tragedy,” the drama (★★★★ out of four; rated R; in theaters now) is a psychological head trip and fictional imagining of Diana's (Stewart) time with the British royal family over three days around Christmas 1991, spent at the queen’s annual holiday destination, Sandringham House.

Diana has already had it with cold Prince Charles (a very punchable Jack Farthing) and a separation is around the corner, but the princess is haunted by her past and present as the toil and trouble of being part of the monarchy weighs on her heavily.

Princess Diana: Hollywood's obsession will never end, but it's getting ridiculous

As the film opens, she’s already going her own way: Diana zooms along alone in her sports car apart from the rest of the family – including sons Harry (Freddie Spry) and William (Jack Nielen) – and is late, having gotten lost and had to stop at a fish-and-chips shop for directions. Once she reaches the palatial estate, Diana is welcomed by having to get on a scale, a family tradition in which fun over the holidays is measured in extra pounds at the end – not great for those wrestling with an eating disorder like Diana.

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

From the command wardrobe changes to the queen (Stella Gonet) giving her stares at dinner to Charles mansplaining how there has to be two of her (“the real you and the one they take pictures of”), it all gets a little maddening for Diana. She has a staunch ally in royal dresser Maggie (a fabulous Sally Hawkins), though her helper is sent away by the powers that be, and Diana’s increasingly drawn to a neighboring farm where she spent time in her childhood, a scarecrow-dotted contrast to her current celebrity status.

“Spencer” is a sister film to Larrain’s fabulous “Jackie” (with Natalie Portman as a grieving Jackie Kennedy) in creating a surreal and fantastical environment around a real person. Diana sees visions of not only memories of herself, but also Anne Boleyn as the claustrophobia of her situation takes hold. She’s surrounded by shifting Kubrickian horrors – this Sandringham is about as creepy a joint as the Overlook in “The Shining” – and Larraín boldly shows its effects on her. One scene has her beautiful gown splayed across the floor gloriously as she rests her head on a toilet, and there are a couple outstanding moments (like an unnerving bit with a bowl of soup) involving the pearls Charles gifted her – the same he also gave rumored mistress Camilla Parker Bowles.

Oscars 2022: Kristen Stewart vaults to the front of the best-actress race as Princess Diana

In a career-best turn (and sporting a serviceable English accent), Stewart wonderfully navigates Diana’s out-of-control spiral and crafts a deeply complex character it’s impossible not to love, whether or not you’re an Anglophile obsessed with royal goings-on. There’s paranoia, terror, anger and sadness in her rousing portrayal that arrives balanced by the love, happiness and protective nature she exudes when she’s around her boys. “I want to be your mum,” Diana tells them. “That’s my job.”

Larraín puts Diana through hell, but the best thing he does in “Spencer” is lift her back up. It’s a ghost story but also an underdog’s story, a fighter’s story, a mother’s story and, thanks to an Oscar-ready Stewart at the absolute top of her game, one of the very best movies you’ll see this year.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

In “Spencer,” Kristen Stewart’s Princess Diana Is Forever Trying Out Roles

By Anthony Lane

Kristen Stewart as Diana Princess of Wales wearing a white dress and a blazer as she stands in a foggy field.

Picture the scene. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, mooching around their Montecito stronghold and desperate to get out for the evening, are picking a movie to see. “Dune”? Too long. “No Time to Die”? Too sad. Harry won’t watch “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” because it reminds him of the British press. Meghan won’t watch “The Addams Family 2,” because it reminds her of lunch at Windsor Castle. “Hey, I know!” she cries. “Let’s go and see a film about your mother .”

“Spencer” is a rum concoction, starring Kristen Stewart as the late Princess of Wales. It is written by Steven Knight, directed by Pablo Larraín, and described at the outset as “a fable from a true tragedy”—fancy talk for “We kind of made this stuff up.” The time frame is concise: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and December 26th. (No year is specified, but I would guess 1991.) Most of the action takes place in and around Sandringham House, the royal residence in the county of Norfolk. Diana travels there alone, in a Porsche, without a security detail. She gets lost along the way and stops to ask for directions, admitting, “I’ve absolutely no idea where I am.” This is unlikely, since she should know the area well; she was born and raised on the Sandringham Estate. What Larraín wants to make thumpingly clear, though, is that Diana is now a soul adrift, wretched in her marriage to Prince Charles (Jack Farthing) and all but ostracized by his relations.

Anyone who endured a film like “Diana” (2013)—a starchy royal bio-pic, with Naomi Watts—will gather, within minutes, that “Spencer” is going to be far more elastic, not to say expressionist, in regard to the rules of the genre. The people we meet here, as in a children’s game, are split into goodies and baddies. One side comprises Diana, her sons, William and Harry (very well played, with a solemn charm, by Jack Nielen and Freddie Spry), and Maggie (Sally Hawkins), her favorite dresser and confidante, who says things like “Hold on. Fight them. Be beautiful.” There is also the head chef, Darren (Sean Harris), who is sympathetic to Diana’s plight, though he is busy overseeing the foodstuffs, lobsters included, that are ferried to the house by troops. A sign on the kitchen wall, possibly borrowed from the set of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” reads “Keep noise to a minimum. They can hear you.” Yikes.

“They,” of course, refers to the opposing team, captained by the Queen (Stella Gonet) and concentrated in the frigid—and fictional—person of Major Alistair Gregory, who is played, in a lavish piece of miscasting, by Timothy Spall, one of the warmest of character actors. Gregory has been drafted in to keep everything safe and secure; instead, he merely fortifies Diana’s belief that she is being imprisoned. To deter the prying lenses of photographers, Gregory has her bedroom curtains sewn shut. She promptly cuts them open and, as an afterthought, deliberately snips her bare arm. Or maybe she imagines doing so, since the flesh is then shown to be, as yet, unhurt.

The movie teems with bad dreams of this kind. Diana’s necklace—a present from her husband—breaks, at dinner, and the pearls drop into a bowl of thick green soup. She fishes them out, swallows them, and later regurgitates them: a gloopy, gothic heightening of the bulimia from which Diana, at her unhappiest, is known to have suffered. Other fantasies are more tenuous still, notably the appearance of Anne Boleyn (Amy Manson), who pops up here and there as a cautionary kindred spirit, the implication being that to lose your mind (“I’m a magnet for madness,” Diana says) is the latter-day equivalent of losing your head, as the luckless Anne did in 1536. Her presence in “Spencer” also answers a nagging question: Why do filmmakers keep on lugging the saga of modern British royalty onto our screens? Because it is the only costume drama that happens to have lingered, unaccountably, into the here and now.

The most telling invention devised by Knight and Larraín concerns Diana’s birthplace, Park House, a short walk from where she is staying for Christmas. One night, she sneaks over to the dark, deserted building, where relics of her childhood, such as a doll’s house, are conveniently strewn. The staircase cracks underfoot, and she envisages launching herself from the top of it. But here’s the thing. In 1983, well before the events depicted, or cooked up, in “Spencer,” the Queen gave Park House to Leonard Cheshire Disability, a charity of which she is the patron—a gesture of no interest to this ungenerous film. (Leonard Cheshire, a much decorated Second World War pilot, and an observer at Nagasaki, was a saintly, efficient, and altogether remarkable man, who devoted the second half of his life to the care of others.) In 1987, Park House opened as a hotel for the disabled. It was not , therefore, available for paranoid prowling.

“Spencer” is, in many ways, baloney, abundantly spiced with slander. It is contemptuous of those whom it accuses of treating Diana with contempt. Although Maggie says to her, “Don’t see conspiracy everywhere,” the film sees nothing but. I can’t decide what made me laugh louder: the dead pheasant, stiffly positioned on the road at the entrance to Sandringham, like a prop from a Monty Python sketch, or the Prince of Wales informing his wife that “you have to be able to make your body do things you hate.” He sounds like a Pilates instructor.

And yet, strange to say, the film is hard to ignore. For all its follies, I would rather watch it again than sit through further episodes of “The Crown.” The sight of that show clawing toward the credible, without ever quite getting there, is painful to behold, whereas Larraín is somehow freed by the liberties that he takes with historical facts. Just as he drew us into the grieving consciousness of Jacqueline Kennedy, in “ Jackie ” (2016), so, now, he tunes in to Diana’s high anxiety; the camera is constantly on her, with her, and around her, as if drunk on her perception of the world.

Much is demanded, then, of Kristen Stewart, and she responds with vigor. What we get is not so much an authentic portrait (though the shy tilt of the head is uncanny) as a set of variations on the theme of Diana, ranging from the tender to the loopy, and stressing the extent to which she herself is forever trying out roles. The best scene finds her waking her sons up, for early-morning Christmas presents, and starting a game—gruffly pretending to be in the military. (“Do you want to be king, soldier?” William is asked by his brother.) Keeping Stewart company is a wonderful score by Jonny Greenwood , which mingles echoes of Purcell with noodling riffs. Unbalanced and unjust, “Spencer” is nonetheless perversely gripping. It dares to unbend, playing the angry fool amid kings-to-be, queens, princes, princesses, and all that jazz.

If you doubt that any movie could pay more exhaustive attention to its heroine than “Spencer” does, try “Hive.” Written and directed by Blerta Basholli, it’s another feature film based on a real person: in this case, a woman named Fahrije (Yllka Gashi), proud and severe, who seldom escapes our frame of vision. Like the Princess of Wales, Fahrije is the mother of two children, but she dwells at the opposite end of the economic spectrum, in a village in Kosovo, and I suspect that she would, if apprised of Diana’s unusual predicament, advise her to toughen up fast. It takes a lot to make Fahrije smile and even more to make her weep, so how come she cries when she realizes that her daughter has begun her periods? Is it because of what awaits her as a woman, in the teeth of a wolfish society?

Not until the end credits are we told what has befallen Fahrije, though vigilant viewers will have pieced the tale together. Her husband was among the local Albanian Kosovars rounded up by Serbian forces, seven years earlier, in 1999. He is still missing, presumed dead, though Fahrije doesn’t share this presumption. She is a widow-in-waiting, that most forlorn of creatures, and she is joined and sustained in her limbo by fellow-wives, who also fear the worst. Somewhere behind “Hive,” I think, you can hear the far-off cry of Euripides’ “The Trojan Women,” which recounts the agony of Hecuba, the Queen of Troy, and of others bereaved by the ruination of their home—and which, incidentally, was staged out of doors in Pristina, the Kosovan capital, in 2018.

The bitterest aspect of Basholli’s film is the attitude of the men in the village. Far from supporting the single women, they scorn them, and resent any hint of female enterprise or independence. Fahrije has plenty of both. She learns to drive, she keeps bees, and she branches out, with the aid of her friends, into producing ajvar , a paste made from roasted red peppers, to be sold in a Pristina supermarket. And what does she get for her pains? She is called a whore. A stone is thrown through the window of her car. And, in the most evocative scene, she finds her jars of ajvar smashed, and the womenfolk picking through the debris, like gleaners on a battlefield. In a movie that is redolent of violence, yet devoid of bloodshed, here is a welter of scarlet. Fahrije, of course, clears up, and carries on. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

How we became infected by chain e-mail .
Twelve classic movies to watch with your kids.
The secret lives of fungi .
The photographer who claimed to capture the ghost of Abraham Lincoln .
Why are Americans still uncomfortable with atheism ?
The enduring romance of the night train .
Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

“The Fall Guy” Is Gravity-Defying Fun, in Every Sense

By Richard Brody

“The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed” Is a Deceptively Plain Masterpiece

By Justin Chang

The Beautifully Unnerving Gaze of “Evil Does Not Exist”

Entertainment
Celebrities
Ticket Sales
Promoted: What to Watch on Prime Video

Johnny Oleksinski

Kristen stewart is hauntingly brilliant as princess diana in ‘spencer’.

View Author Archive
Get author RSS feed

Thanks for contacting us. We've received your submission.

TORONTO — Director Pablo Larraín took a big gamble when he cast Kristen Stewart in a role as weighty and revered as Princess Diana.

The Chilean’s game of royal roulette has paid off.

Because Stewart, who we’ve always known is scores better than the average-to-wretched scripts she’s so frequently handed — “Twilight,” “Snow White and the Huntsman,” “Charlie’s Angels” — is haunting, playful and blisteringly human as Di at the end of her rope .

Her princess is a broken woman so alive with promise and love and humor, but held back by mummified royals who only scold and sneer, and an unfeeling, slimeball husband. All she has in the world are her two boys, who worship their mum. The tragedy is that every millisecond of the movie, we’re fully aware of the fate that will befall this young mother.

Stewart is the star of “Spencer,” a dream-like movie that had its North American premiere Wednesday night at the Toronto International Film Festival. The evening was easily the most electric of the entire week, and brought the audience back to the good old days — most seats were full, there was rousing applause at the end and film buffs loudly analyzed every moment on the way out. As it should be.

The unconventional drama, which takes place over an imagined Christmas at Sandringham shortly before her and Charles’ divorce, is one of several films and TV shows resurrecting Diana lately, including “The Crown” and “Diana the Musical,” which is coming to Broadway in November and Netflix in October.

“Spencer,” by a long shot, is the most fictional of them all. Through its fibs, however, the movie manages to be the most honest and probing take, and gets to the meat of what was tormenting the People’s Princess better than any simple historical retelling ever could.

Kristen Stewart plays a troubled Princess Diana in "Spencer."

Larraín’s 2016 film “Jackie,” which starred Natalie Portman as a mourning Jackie Kennedy in the aftermath of husband John F. Kennedy’s assassination, took a similar tack. The director likes to use enormously famous women to explore grief and survival in the spotlight. His movies, while sly and clever, are almost like operas in their emotional heft. In his vision, Diana obsesses over “off with her head!” Anne Boleyn — seeing herself in Henry VIII’s wronged wife. I kept thinking about Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena.”

The director has other theatrical tendencies. In one fantasy sequence — one of many — Diana rips off her pearl necklace at dinner, the pearls fall into her bowl of soup and she eats them. The jewelry crunches against her molars. It’s freakin’ weird, yes, but you get it.

What you’ll also get from Larraín’s moody film is a glimpse at how Diana was feeling shortly before her marriage fell apart for all the world to see. You will not be treated to a historical rundown of actual recorded events. And, unlike Peter Morgan’s “The Crown” and “The Queen,” you will not get a sympathetic, “isn’t she wonderful!” Queen Elizabeth II. We view the world from Diana’s perspective, so goodness emanates only from her children, William and Harry, and the servants she’s closest to (Sally Hawkins beautifully plays one named Maggie).

In one scene, late for yet another palace meal, Diana turns to her adoring kids and says, “Will they kill me, you think?” Steven Knight’s script ain’t trying to be nice.

Stewart won’t win the Best British Accent trophy at the Kids’ Choice Awards, and the film is not what we’ve come to expect from palace intrigue dramas, or any historical Oscar bait, really.

But of all the Diana projects out there, this is the one the late Diana Spencer would want you to see.

Share this article:

'Spencer' review: Kristen Stewart gives the performance of her life as Diana Spencer

It’s not a biopic.

It’s not a biopic. You should know that about “Spencer,” only in theaters, in which LA-born Kristen Stewart gives the performance of her life as Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales. Oscar should smile on Stewart, who makes “Spencer” a spellbinder from first scene to last.

Just don’t expect Diana’s full story. “Spencer” offers only 72 hours in the tumultuous life of the People’s Princess as she’s about to celebrate Christmas 1991 at Sandringham with the royal family and Prince Charles (Jack Farthing), the cheating husband she wants to kick to the curb.

PHOTO: Kristen Stewart appears as Princess Diana in a trailer for the film, "Spencer."

That’s not so easy. Living in the Windsor pumpkin shell has driven Diana to mental collapse, worsened by her self abuse through cutting and bulimia. Diana would willingly disappear were it not for her young and adoring sons, William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry).

For Chilean director Pablo Larrain, whose “Jackie” won an Oscar nomination for Natalie Portman in the role of JFK’s widow in the turbulent period just after his assassination, this tightly focused cinema snapshot becomes a cracked mirror into a woman’s soul.

MORE: 'Cry Macho' review: Clint Eastwood is a classic in every sense of the word

Working from a dream-like script by Stephen Knight, Larrain imagines Diana from the get-go as lost. Literally. Having defied tradition to drive herself (no security) to the country manor of Queen Elizabeth (a rigidly chilly Stella Gonet), she stops at a café to ask, “Where am I?”

When she arrives late—another form of rebellion—Diana is told to dress as ordered, but not before getting on the scales. It’s a Victorian ritual in which guests are weighed going in and out to make sure they’ve put on pounds after the holiday in tribute to the nonstop, royal feasting.

Wait, it gets worse. Servants examine Diana’s pillow for hairs that might belong to a secret lover. Her bedroom curtains are sewn shut to foil paparazzi. Royal disapproval falls so heavily on Diana that she imagines herself as Anne Boleyn, the beheaded second wife of Henry VIII.

PHOTO: Kristen Stewart appears as Princess Diana in a trailer for the 2021 film, "Spencer."

With in-house spies monitoring her every move for the crown or to sell her out to the media, Diana finds warmth and playful companionship with her dresser, Maggie, a small role given size, scope and genuine feeling by the great Sally Hawkins. But Maggie is soon sent away, leaving military man Alistar Gregory (a standout Timothy Spall) to keep Diana in line. Or else.

Other Dianas, from Emma Corrin and Elizabeth Debicki in “The Crown” to Jenna de Waal in Broadway’s “Diana: The Musical,” paint their portraits of Diana on a larger canvas. But Stewart‘s three-days-in-a-life interpretation is beyond compare and tellingly, thrillingly alive.

MORE: 'Cruella' review: Emma Stone and Emma Thompson deliver much to enjoy in this beautifully crafted fluffball

Without flashbacks or a mansplaining script, Stewart nails every nuance as Diana wanders the estate where she grew up as a carefree child in a rental house, now boarded up and full of ghosts to remind Diana of her once unscrutinized bliss as part of the Spencer family.

Download the all new "Popcorn With Peter Travers " podcasts on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Tunein , Google Play Music and Stitcher .

Stewart, 31, knows the fame drill, having been a tabloid princess since her teen idol days as the star of the “Twilight” saga. That popularity probably influenced the snob Academy to ignore her stunning work in “Clouds of Sils Maria,” “Personal Shopper” and “Seberg.”

But there is no ignoring the Stewart tour de force in “Spencer.” The technical demands of the role from strict posture to posh accent are absorbed into an intimate and indelible portrayal that finds the grit, grace and grieving heart of a caged spirit.

What starts as an emotional horror show ends as the best jailbreak movie since “Shawshank.” There’s nothing here of the car crash that tragically ended Diana’s life at 36 in1996. Instead, “Spencer” shows Diana in the revitalizing act of escape from her privileged prison. And thanks to Stewart’s brilliant, bittersweet, utterly transporting performance, we get to watch her fly.

Exclusive: Mom speaks out after Air Force rescued son from cruise ship

May 9, 7:36 AM

Forecast reveals where you might see the northern lights in the US this weekend

May 10, 2:14 PM

What led to DNA match, arrest of minister two decades after murders of 2 teens

May 10, 6:03 AM

Judge warns Michael Cohen to stop talking about Trump hush money case

May 10, 4:11 PM

Barron Trump declines Florida GOP delegate position due to 'prior commitments'

May 10, 6:58 PM

ABC News Live

24/7 coverage of breaking news and live events

Entertainment

‘Spencer’ review: Casting of Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana is strangely inspired

Movie review.

The sad saga of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, seems destined to be told from numerous lenses: At the moment, you can choose from a television version (“The Crown,” from Season 3 on Netflix), a Broadway musical (“Diana,” opening to, ahem, mixed reviews ), and now “Spencer,” a film directed by Pablo Larrain (who previously examined another thoroughly scrutinized woman in “ Jackie ”). Introducing itself as “a fable from a true tragedy,” “Spencer” isn’t a biopic, but instead takes place over a desperately uncomfortable three-day Christmas holiday at the Queen’s Sandringham estate, late in Diana’s ill-fated marriage to Prince Charles. Meals are served, gowns are donned, traditions are followed and a young woman slowly fades away.

What’s most interesting about this impeccably elegant film is not its story — surely even those deeply interested in Diana’s life have pondered every possible angle by now — but its central performance. Kristen Stewart is far from an obvious match for Diana, being an American who is neither tall nor blue-eyed, but her casting turns out to be strangely inspired. Stewart — and it shouldn’t be necessary to say at this point that she’s a far better and more nuanced actor than the “Twilight” movies ever hinted at — is uncannily good at conveying nervous, clenched anxiety. Here she creates a woman who’s practically a shadow of herself. This Diana, a pale wraith who clutches at her children like she needs them to keep her tethered, is a bird in a luxurious trap; we see the eating disorders, the mental illness, the misery. In one scene, guards find her wandering the grounds at night. “Just say you saw a ghost,” she tells them; it’s barely a lie.

Stewart lets us see how a pearl necklace (a gift from Charles, who gave the same thing to his mistress) feels like a weight around Diana’s neck; how she seems to be slowly sealed off from the world, step by step; how a chilly castle can’t be made warm with extra blankets. You watch wishing this story, in the real world, could have had a different ending; and marveling at how Stewart finds new, close-to-the-bone layers in a character we thought we already knew.

With Kristen Stewart, Timothy Spall, Jack Farthing, Sean Harris, Sally Hawkins. Directed by Pablo Larrain, from a screenplay by Steven Wright. 116 minutes. Rated R for some language. Opens Nov. 5 at multiple theaters.

Movie Review: Kristen Stewart resurrects Diana — “Spencer”

“Spencer” is nothing less than the reinvention of Kristen Stewart. Her portrayal of a troubled, mercurial, vain and bitter Diana, Princess of Wales is that startling, that much of a career-reset.

Her performance starts with an uncanny impersonation — the way Diana held her head, the whisper she always seemed to speak in, her carriage, stride and simple “ready for my closeup” beauty. We forget that this is actually the actress-turned-celebrity nicknamed “K-Stew” in a heartbeat. We even see flashes where she looks not just like Diana, but Naomi Watts, who played the princess in “Diana” some years back.

And almost as quickly as we lose the actress in that impersonation, she and the film transcend mimicry and plunge into the psyche of a woman wronged — a rich, powerful and unconcerned family that circled the wagons around the “outsider” to protect the feckless fop and heir to the throne, Prince Charles ( Jack Farthing ).

If I’ve seen a better performance in recent years than Stewart’s in this “fable from a true tragedy,” I can’t remember it. She’s stunning.

Pablo Larraín — he made “Jackie” with Natalie Portman a few years back — works from a detailed, minimalist screenplay by Steven Knight (“Locke,” “Dirty Pretty Things,” “Eastern Promises”) to produce an up-close-and-personal profile of Diana in her time of trial, the Christmas she reached her limit and ditch Charles and the Windsors, if not her fame.

Like “Jackie” and “Judy” and for that matter this month’s “King Richard,” this is biography as fantasia, a “what should have happened” story with a hint of fact and a whiff of fantasy.

It’s flattering, but nothing like a hagiography. There’s no image polishing, with just the barest mention of Diana’s “ban landmines” activism. She is vain, constantly asking “How do I look?” never venturing out less than stunningly turned out.

Diana is impulsive, lashing out within the strictures of her “duties” as she makes statements with what she wears and gives away what she “knows” about Charles and the old flame he never shook off, and carried on an affair with while both were married, simply by donning a pearl necklace.

Her most passive aggressive act of all is making the smug Corgi-fancier with “HRH” attached to her name, and her untidy family, wait. Stella Gonet has just a few scenes to suggest an Elizabeth that Helen Mirren won an Oscar portraying — emotionally-stunted, rigid and adamant about “tradition” and protocol, the older and more ludicrously out of date, the better.

When we meet Diana, she’s motoring about the countryside in her Porsche convertible, looking for Sandringham House, a drafty royal estate that is, coincidentally, next door to the great house gone to ruin that Diana grew up in, back when she was Diana Spencer.

Diana is so lost she has to ask directions from the gobsmacked inhabitants of a local pub. And failing there, she stumbles into the proud, dutiful and sympathetic royal head chef, Darren ( Sean Harris , superb), who points her the right way.

Darren’s big staff prepares one ostentatiously sumptuous feast after another over the 1992 holidays, with him egging them on with a challenge borne of genuine affection and concern.

“I want our Princess of Wales to WANT something.”

Everybody in the Royal household knows of Diana’s eating disorder, and some even see it as a product of the ugly stresses of paparazzi, tabloid journalists, a husband straying with another woman, and his family’s indifference to Diana’s plight.

A sign in that kitchen orders one and all to “Keep the Noise to a Minimum. They Can Hear You.” And they do. For all the “security” surrounding this lot, the dressers, cooks and functionaries are — it is implied — their own gossiping/”reporting” social network.

Another sign is just as telling. The carefully-organized designer wardrobe Diana is to wear to every meal, outing, ceremony and the like carries a tag — “P.O.W.” You can think that stands for “Princess of Wales” if you like. But as we’ve already met the new Master of the Household, a retired Black Watch officer based on an RAF officer who had such duties, we can leap to a more ironic acronym conclusion.

Major Alastair Gregory ( Timothy Spall , chilling) can seem sympathetic, but his sternness points to trouble on the horizon. He is there to keep the tabloids at bay, and it is implied, a tight rein on Diana.

“I watch so that others may not see,” he says, trying to curb Diana’s tendency to let the public and the press see more of her — candidly or otherwise — than the royal family would like, another way she fights her treatment and the restraints put upon her by her role, her fame and keeping her “place.”

Gregory cannot abide tardiness, and the admittedly paranoid Diana perceives cruelty and conspiracy in his actions.

Diana’s one confidante in the entire “holiday” travel party is her dresser, played by Oscar-winner Sally Hawkins. Her unguarded and improper bit of advice?

“They can’t change. YOU be the change.”

Over the course of three days, Diana’s “ridiculousness” — “silliness” is how she tells her oldest son William to describe it — rubs the mostly-offstage Royals the wrong way, time and again. We mostly see her, alone in her room or striding down cavernous empty halls, and see and hear servants of varying ranks knocking, calling out “ Dessert, madam” or “The Family is waiting to open presents, madam.”

And Diana, finding a conspicuously-played book about the wife King Henry VIII murdered, Anne Boleyn, starts seeing Anne ( Amy Manson ) in her dreams and visions. Her paranoia and despair grow and grow.

Stewart’s portrayal is so vulnerable and alluring that if you’re so inclined, she could make you fall in love with “The People’s Princess” all over again. And it’s worth noting that the pretty actress has never been filmed in more flattering light. Kids who grew up on “Twilight” are thus encouraged to fall in love with Kristen Stewart again, too.

The movie around her is the damnedest thing, a script that ventures from cracker-jack to kind of crackers in the directions it takes Diana’s psyche and the lifeline it invents for her to grab.

“Spencer” owes a debt to “Jackie,” and to “Great Expectations” (a ruined family mansion, lost connections) and even “Citizen Kane.” Diana has her own “Rosebud,” and you’ll recognize it the moment she dons it.

Sure, it’s a one-sided portrait, although a more complex picture of Charles emerges despite the fact that Farthing (of TV’s latest “Poldark”) has few scenes to make an impression.

And no, it’s not the truth, or even The Gospel According to Diana.

But “Spencer” is still one of the best-written, best-acted pictures of the year. And if there’s any justice, Stewart will get the chance to smile her trademark coy grin and play with her hair, this time for a global TV audience. Oscar night could very well be her night.

Rating: R, for some language (partial nudity)

Cast: Kristen Stewart, Timothy Spall, Jack Farthing, Stella Gonet, Sean Harris and Sally Hawkins

Credits: Directed by Pablo Larraín, scripted by Steven Knight. A Topic Studios film, a Neon release.

Running time: 1:57

About Roger Moore

Find a Movie Review

Like Movie Nation on Facebook

Recent Reviews/Stories

Classic Film Review: British Marriages Never Looked the Same after “A Kind of Loving” (1962)
Movie Preview: June Squibb is elderly, armed and dangerous — “Thelma”
Movie Review: Tarantino Town, “The Last Stop in Yuma County”
Netflixable? Brooke Shields is “Mother of the Bride,” Benjamin Bratt is father of the groom in a Phuket Wedding
Movie Review: “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”
February 2024
January 2024
December 2023
November 2023
October 2023
September 2023
August 2023
February 2023
January 2023
December 2022
November 2022
October 2022
September 2022
August 2022
February 2022
January 2022
December 2021
November 2021
October 2021
September 2021
August 2021
February 2021
January 2021
December 2020
November 2020
October 2020
September 2020
August 2020
February 2020
January 2020
December 2019
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
February 2019
January 2019
December 2018
November 2018
October 2018
September 2018
August 2018
February 2018
January 2018
December 2017
November 2017
October 2017
September 2017
August 2017
February 2017
January 2017
December 2016
November 2016
October 2016
September 2016
August 2016
February 2016
January 2016
December 2015
November 2015
October 2015
September 2015
August 2015
February 2015
January 2015
December 2014
November 2014
October 2014
September 2014
August 2014
February 2014
January 2014
December 2013
November 2013
October 2013
September 2013
August 2013
February 2013
January 2013
December 2012
November 2012
October 2012
September 2012
August 2012
February 2012
January 2012
December 2011
rogermooresmovienation.fi…
wordhippo.com/what-is/the…
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bo…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gua…
decidedlygrim.net/?p=7652
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chr…
imdb.com/name/nm9014541/?…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_…
Deadline.com
Internet Movie Car Database
Internet Movie Database
The Hollywood Reporter

Follow Movie Nation by email

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address:

Blogs I Follow

Movie Nation
Mann-ing Up
Action/Adventure Film & Screenplay Festival
Reel Time Flicks
From the Fourth Row!
keithandthemovies.wordpress.com/
Los Angeles feedback film festival
LOWLIFE MAGAZINE
The Watcher Blog

RSS Feeds — subscribe, or else

RSS - Posts
RSS - Comments

Tweets and more tweets

Max Von Sydow

Roger Moore's film criticism, against the grain since 1984.

Living in a Mann’s World

Get your short film showcased at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Get your screenplay showcased at the Writing Festival.

Film reviews, news, previews and general insane ramblings of a film enthusiast!

Movies, Reviews,Trailers,Interviews and News

A monthly event... LAFeedbackFilmFestival.com

"Find what you love and let it kill you." – Charles Bukowski

Keeping an eye on all the latest mainstream films and television.

Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Subscribe Subscribed
Copy shortlink
Report this content
View post in Reader
Manage subscriptions
Collapse this bar

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy . We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

‘Spencer’ Review: Kristen Stewart Slips Into Princess Diana in Pablo Larraín’s Unnerving Portrait of an Icon

Share on Facebook
Share to Flipboard
Share on LinkedIn
Show more sharing options
Submit to Reddit
Post to Tumblr
Print This Page
Share on WhatsApp

Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2021 Venice Film Festival. Neon and Topic releases the film in theaters on Friday, November 5.

Shortly before the People’s Princess drives solo into this latest telling of her tale behind the wheel of a top-down convertible, an opening epitaph promises us, “A fable based on a true tragedy.” But then, given the tight narrative focus of Pablo Larraín ’s “ Spencer ,” which takes place in 1991 over the course of three excruciating yuletide days at the royal estate of Sandringham, one might ask: To what tragedy does that opening inscription refer?

Is the onetime Diana Spencer a tragic figure because of her life — her unhappy marriage, her impossible expectations, her– listen, there are two seasons of “The Crown” about this, you already know the story — or because of her death, which arrived five and half years outside the scope of the film? This film would say both.

Related Stories ‘Force of Nature: The Dry 2’ Review: Eric Bana Returns for Another Down Under Crime Caper ‘Witness’ Director Peter Weir’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2024 Venice Film Festival Is Richly Deserved

With “Spencer,” director Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight have devised an often-unnerving portrait of a pop icon that works from the (almost certainly correct) assumption that in the hearts and minds of today’s public, those two facets of Diana’s story are inextricably linked. Without delving into the specifics of what happened one terrible night in Paris, Diana’s sad fate hangs over the film like a shroud, informing everything that follows.

Doing away with any pretense of docu-realism, “Spencer” is neither a film about specifics nor any of conventional biopic; it is instead a sort of haunted house chamber piece that doesn’t try to locate the real woman behind the legend — as the title might suggest — as it does to reimagine her within a wholly different pop lexicon. If Larraín dipped his toe in gothic waters with “Jackie,” and its many scenes where Natalie Portman drifted through an empty White House like a ghost haunting her previous life, here he jumps all the way in, staging “Spencer” as a psychodrama swimming the same tides as “Repulsion,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” or “Black Swan.”

Often reacting wordlessly against an oppressive Jonny Greenwood score of dissonant strings and wailing horns, Kristen Stewart meets her character halfway, adopting Diana’s posh inflection while playing her with the same waifish and haunted affect the actress put to such good use in her work with Olivier Assayas. So brash in its affectations as to occasionally cross the line into pure camp, the film finds little use for subtlety and no secret of its intent. When a patrolman catches Diana walking the grounds late one fog-filled night, the princess begs the guard not to report it. “Say you saw a ghost,” she offers instead.

More narratively threadbare than “Jackie” if not quite as formally rebellious as “Ema,” this latest in Larraín’s eclectic filmography stakes out an interesting middle ground between those previous two. For nearly all of its running time, “Spencer” charges forward as a series of set pieces tracking the acute psychological damage being in this gilded prison does to the young woman. The damage manifests in countless ways, from bouts of bulimia and self-harm, hallucinations of another doomed royal, Anne Boleyn, to a standout (and entirely dialogue-free) dinner scene where a string ensemble appears out of the blue, playing against Greenwood’s jolting score.

Tracking Diana over the course of three days, from her arrival at the sprawling estate on Christmas Eve to her decision to leave (both the estate and family) two days later, the script pointedly avoids any shouting matches or scenes of domestic drama. Charles (Jack Farthing) gets his first line of dialogue at right around the one-hour mark, turning up next to Diana as a particularly uninteresting tablemate at an entirely leaden formal banquet. That first line? A contemptuous barb — delivered with aristocratic dispassion, naturally — about her eating disorder.

And if all the familiar royals show up here and there, few get any more screentime than shots of the lavishly prepared feasts, while none are given even a fraction of the dialogue offered to the house staff, here represented by the sterling trio of Sean Harris, Timothy Spall, and Sally Hawkins, proving once and again the limitless durability of the English character actor. The three weave their way through the manor’s halls, helping to ground Diana (and “Spencer”) in the lulls between set-piece freak-outs.

Only for all their onscreen talent, the trio also reflects some of the real limitations in Larraín and Knight’s chosen approach. In this hermetically sealed, closed circuit of manor, everything — every action and conversation and line of dialogue — reflects everything else. Which is to say that when the house’s kind-hearted head chef (Harris, playing against reedy type with real warmth) tells Diana about the pheasants the groundskeepers breed for hunting, or when the coldly impassive butler (Spall, whose slimmed down figure, sunken jowls and cold mien gave him the air of the most British man to ever work at the Overlook Hotel) talks about his military sacrifice for the Crown, the subtext — if you could even call it subtext — never changes.

Nor, for that matter, does Diana. Maybe because the timing is still too soon, perhaps the real figure is still too defined, but whatever the case, Knight and Larraín don’t allow themselves the same freedom with Diana the character — with her background and motivations and reactions within the moment — as they do with the film’s form. Stewart does terrific work as this royal-turned-scream-queen, but one does get the sense that she could be even better were “Spencer” to allow the character to go as wild as everything else does around her.

For all its impressive formal swings, the film’s aura of repetitive, notes-on-a-theme fatalism can wear thin over time, which is very much the point. In that respect, Larraín shows his cards in a late, beautifully acted scene between Stewart and Hawkins that offers, with its change of scenery, a change of pace, a blast of light and human warmth. And as “Spencer” lingers within that sunnier tempo throughout its closing moments, it ironically reveals the figure’s third great tragedy: That there was another kind of world open to Diana, another sort of life possible for her all along.

“ Spencer” premiered at the 2021 Venice Film Festival.

Love Lies Bleeding review – Kristen Stewart lifts brilliant bodybuilding noir

Violent story of extreme sport, forbidden love and a lot of murder could be a new grindhouse classic, but Stewart’s fierce subtlety pushes it up a level

B ritish film-maker Rose Glass lets rip with some pure roid-rage cinema in this uproarious, horribly violent and lethally smart noir thriller sited in the Venn diagram overlap between bodybuilding, murder and sex. The bodycount climbs so alarmingly that the characters are in danger of running out of rugs to roll the corpses up in.

Glass has assembled a great cast – but first among equals has to be Kristen Stewart who gives an excellent performance as gym manager and twitchy nicotine addict Lou, embroiled in an amour fou. Why aren’t we talking more, or in fact all the time, about what a great actress Stewart is? Her snapping: “No!” in a tense situation and thereby refusing to let herself have a cigarette from a stray pack, is one of the laugh lines of the year.

Love Lies Bleeding channels Elmore Leonard in its garish tale of forbidden love, chaotic crime and gnarly incidental characters with bad hair and bad attitudes, but Glass and her co-writer Weronika Tofilska playfully give us some Jonathan Swift in having Gulliver’s Travels on the TV in one shot, and then giving us a surreal Brobdingnagian freakout in the climactic confrontation.

The setting is a town in the New Mexico desert – a Breaking Bad-type landscape striated with dangerous ravines – and the date is 1989, though you might not notice the absence of smartphones until news about the Berlin Wall crops up in one scene. Lou is employed at a gym, whose walls are plastered with two kinds of poster: the ones disclaiming legal responsibility for equipment-related injuries and the ones telling you to push yourself, because pain is just weakness leaving the body. Sadly, many characters are to experience that other and more commonplace kind of pain which is weakness entering the body.

Lou’s life has been about banal workplace tasks such as unblocking the lavatories, but is suddenly exalted by the lightning strike of love. A new customer called Jackie (Katy O’Brian) is passing through on her way to the bodybuilding championships in Las Vegas: ripped, tough and devastatingly sexy. They fall in love, and Lou fatefully introduces Jackie to steroids. Meanwhile, federal officers are inquiring about Lou’s estranged father Lou Sr (Ed Harris) and both Lou and Jackie boil with rage about the way Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone) is being beaten up her odious husband JJ (Dave Franco), for whom a reckoning is on its way.

For a film as over-the-top as this, it might be counterintuitive to talk about subtlety, but Stewart is genuinely that; her line readings are coolly calibrated, quizzical, restrained, sometimes infinitesimally double-taking at the bizarre or outrageous things happening in front of her. Her lack of obvious response is due to being herself much tougher than we quite realised. Harris is queasily gruesome as Lou Sr, a gun-club manager and insect enthusiast who is also the proprietor of a hilariously grand hacienda featuring a portrait of himself and Lou’s stepmother. This could be a new grindhouse classic; in this world, love is bleeding but it’s not taking anything lying down.

Kristen Stewart
Crime films

Most viewed

Love Lies Bleeding review: Kristen Stewart lives up to internet hype

B ritish filmmaker Rose Glass’ follow up to the adored 2019 horror Saint Maud fits neatly into the modern sub-genre of “an A24 Movie”. The independent studio has gained a reputation for challenging, aesthetically powerful dramas, and crime thriller Love Lies Bleeding certainly fits that description.

Set in the late 80s, Katy O’Brien (The Mandalorian) stars as Jackie, a promising bodybuilder drifting her way to Vegas for a big content. She picks up a job at a small-town shooting range run by shady crime lord Lou Sr (Ed Harris), and catches the eye of his daughter, gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart). The pair fall passionately in love, before an incident involving Lou’s abusive brother-in-law (Dave Franco) has the pair struggling to evade both the police and Lous Sr’s suspicions.

Love Lies Bleeding caused a great deal of buzz when the trailer debuted, Glass builds on her reputation as a distinctive filmmaking voice with a scuzzy, engrossing film. Simply making a Queer Bonnie and Clyde would have been the easy route, but there is a lot more going on in an intriguing story that blurs the lines in terms of who’s good and bad. While it is sexy in parts, this isn’t made for titillation, with the camera gliding over O’Brien’s muscular body both as an act of adoration and a display of power.

If it wasn’t clear that Stewart wanted to set fire to her Twilight-led image , this leaves you in no doubt. As Lou, she’s a misfit who flirts with Jackie by offering steroids and has a surprisingly amount of knowledge regarding corpse disposal. She’s paired excellently with O’Brien, playing the type of character that women don’t often get to play. Jackie is loving and driven, but also a bit of an oaf, thinking with her fists more often than not. With tinted glasses and an epic Hulk Hogan skullet, Harris is chilling as the villain who, for the most part, hasn’t actually done anything wrong. Yet, his presence is a constant threat that opens up Glass’ grimy world, filled with corrupt locals and orange-teethed stalkers (Anna Baryshnikov, in a small but unsettling support role).

Love Lies Bleeding has a couple of moments of excess, namely some hallucination scenes that feel awkward in an otherwise gritty film. However, this caper lives up to the internet hype, cementing its two stars as cult heroes, and confirming its director as an exciting talent.

Love Lies Bleeding is in cinemas from 3 rd May

Love Lies Bleeding review: Kristen Stewart lives up to internet hype

Sat 11 May 2024

2024 newspaper of the year

@ Contact us

Your newsletters

Love Lies Bleeding review: Kristen Stewart’s lesbian crime thriller is a masterpiece

Director rose grass's gory sensibility is put to good use in this steroid-popping, hyper-violent love story.

Undated film still from Love Lies Bleeding. Pictured: Katy O'Brian as Jackie and Kristen Stewart as Lou. See PA Feature SHOWBIZ Film Reviews. WARNING: This picture must only be used to accompany PA Feature SHOWBIZ Film Reviews. PA Photo. Picture credit should read: Crack in the Earth LLC/A24. All Rights Reserved. NOTE TO EDITORS: This picture must only be used to accompany PA Feature SHOWBIZ Film Reviews.

Love Lies Bleeding is the kind of weird little film they don’t make anymore. Vile, bombastic, and slicked with sweat, this turbo-charged lesbian crime thriller is the second offering from director Rose Glass, who broke out with the 2019 indie horror Saint Maud . That film proved her unafraid to make you wrinkle your nose in disgust, a boldness that is put to good use in this steroid-popping, hyper-violent love story.

It’s set in a skid-mark corner of 1989 New Mexico and opens, appropriately enough, with one of our protagonists – the brooding gym attendant Lou ( Kristen Stewart ) – unblocking a clogged toilet. You can always rely on Kristen Stewart to throw you a curveball; her most recent roles include a haunted Princess Diana in Spencer , a bureaucrat who’s turned on by gruesome surgeries in Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future , and now a chain-smoking, beer-swigging lesbian.

When Jackie, a mysterious young itinerant with a gleamingly muscular figure starts working at the same grimly appointed gym on her way to Vegas for a bodybuilding competition, the attraction is instant as Lou watches with secret yearning as Jackie lifts her weights and her biceps ripple.

Undated film still from Love Lies Bleeding. Pictured: Katy O'Brian as Jackie and Kristen Stewart as Lou. See PA Feature SHOWBIZ Film Digest. WARNING: This picture must only be used to accompany PA Feature SHOWBIZ Film Digest. PA Photo. Picture credit should read: Crack in the Earth LLC/A24/Anna Kooris. All Rights Reserved. NOTE TO EDITORS: This picture must only be used to accompany PA Feature SHOWBIZ Film Digest.

Jackie – played by the excellent newcomer Katy O’Brien – needs a place to stay. Soon, she is drawn into Lou’s complicated personal life. Her father is a local criminal patriarch (Ed Harris, positively demonic) and her sister (a thoroughly convincing, lovelorn Jena Malone) is suffering domestic abuse at the hands of her obnoxious husband (a grinning, detestable Dave Franco). When a drug-induced urge for revenge goes awry, Lou and Jackie work together – chaotically – to protect themselves from further retribution.

As they try to protect each other from harm – and the prying eyes of Lou’s former squeeze, the irritating Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) – Lou and Jackie’s infatuation with one another explodes into unhinged amour fou . The film adds fantastical touches to its neo-noir plotting, but it’s the unhealthy and desperately horny lesbian affair at its centre that lures you in.

La Chimera review: Josh O’Connor is 2024’s leading man

La Chimera confirms Josh O'Connor is 2024's leading man

Glass films with a sort of sleazy hyperrealism, with an eye for both grotesque pops of violence and Cronenbergian body horror (the sound design of Jackie’s expanding, creatine-augmented muscles, which the film imagines growing Popeye-style, is hard to shake). But even with its horror elements, you can’t help but root for these two women who have found a rare bubble of understanding.

If Jackie, who behaves erratically and violently, were a man, Love Lies Bleeding might easily be castigated as a film that was in thrall to toxic masculinity. But Jackie is a rare example of toxic femininity, asking us how we view power, gender, and violence. And still, the film does all this without ever once pausing to twiddle its thumbs. It’s too busy pouring kerosene on the evidence and lighting a match.

Kristen Stewart wants Hollywood to stop congratulating itself for making movies with women: 'It feels phony'

The "Love Lies Bleeding" star is preparing to direct her first film.

Kristen Stewart has something to say about Hollywood's lack of female filmmakers: The problem still exists.

"[There's a] thinking that we can check these little boxes, and then do away with the patriarchy, and how we're all made of it," the Love Lies Bleeding said in a new cover story for Porter . "It's easy for them to be like, 'Look what we’re doing. We're making Maggie Gyllenhaal 's movie! We're making Margot Robbie 's movie!’ And you're like, OK, cool. You've chosen four."

Emma McIntyre/Getty

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

Stewart made clear that she wasn't knocking the director of 2021's The Lost Daughter and the producer of Barbie , respectively. Quite the opposite.

"I'm in awe of those women, I love those women [but] it feels phony. If we're congratulating each other for broadening perspective, when we haven't really done enough, then we stop broadening," she said.

The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative released a report in January that showed women made no major gains in Hollywood in 2023: "Of the 116 directors evaluated in 2023, 12.1% were women."

Founder Stacy L. Smith said, "For the companies and industry members who want to believe that the director problem is fixed, it is nowhere near solved."

Related: Kristen Stewart returning to Twilight roots to sink her teeth into vampire thriller with Oscar Isaac

Anna Kooris/A24

Related: Kristen Stewart would only do a Marvel movie if Greta Gerwig was involved

Stewart has worked to bring her movie, based on the 2011 memoir from Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water , to the screen for about seven years. And she's spoken out about the challenges of financing it. In January, she told Variety that she was, "going to make this movie before I ever work for someone else."

The official description of the book promises, "This is not your mother's memoir." It's about Olympic swimming hopeful who accepts a scholarship that allows her to leave behind her abusive father and a mother who's alcoholic and suicidal. "After losing her scholarship to drugs and alcohol, Lidia moves to Eugene and enrolls in the University of Oregon, where she is accepted by Ken Kesey to become one of thirteen graduate students who collaboratively write the novel Caverns with him. Drugs and alcohol continue to flow along with bisexual promiscuity and the discovery of S&M helps ease Lidia's demons. Ultimately Lidia's career as a writer and teacher combined with the love of her husband and son replace the earlier chaos that was her life."

Related: Twilight 's Kristen Stewart gives her latest Edward Cullen take: 'I would have broken up with him immediately'

The Twilight alum noted that it's tough to get anything made, especially if it's different than what's out there.

"My movie is about incest and periods and a woman violently repossessing her voice and body, and it is, at times, hard to watch… but it's gonna be a f---ing thrill ride," she said. "And I think that’s commercial, but I don’t think that I have any gauge on what that means."

Related: Kristen Stewart is brutal and brilliant in the bloody lesbian thriller Love Lies Bleeding

"I think people would want to see that, but then… I think maybe people wanna watch movies about, like, Jesus and dogs."

TYRE PARTNER

ASSOCIATE PARTNER

Love Lies Bleeding Review: Kristen Stewart Sets Screen on Fire With Her Electrifying Performance

Written By : Ria Arora

Edited By: Dishya Sharma

Last Updated: May 10, 2024, 11:16 IST

Mumbai, India

Kristen Stewart and Katy M. O'Brian in Love Lies Bleeding

Love Lies Bleeding A

Invalid Date | English
1 hrs 50 mins | Thriller
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Katy M. O'Brian
Director: Rose Glass

Kristen Stewart and Katy M. O'Brian deliver riveting performances in A24's bold exploration of love, crime, and identity.

Love Lies Bleeding Review: In the realm of cinema, where conformity often reigns supreme, Love Lies Bleeding emerges as a beacon of audacity and originality, transcending genres and defying expectations. Produced by the acclaimed A24, this electrifying film catapults viewers into a world where passion and danger collide with devastating consequences.

At its core lies the tumultuous love story between Lou, a reclusive gym manager portrayed with haunting depth by Kristen Stewart, and Jackie, a determined bodybuilder with dreams of conquering Las Vegas. Their romance, fiery and all-consuming, soon entangles with the sinister machinations of Lou’s criminal family, leading them down a perilous path fraught with violence and deception.

Stewart’s performance as Lou is nothing short of revelatory, capturing the character’s inner turmoil with an intensity that leaves an indelible mark on the audience. Her portrayal, nuanced and gripping, serves as the emotional anchor of the film, guiding viewers through a maze of conflicting loyalties and shattered illusions.

But it is not just Stewart who commands the screen; Katy M. O’Brian delivers a powerhouse performance as Jackie, infusing the character with a fierce determination and vulnerability that resonates long after the credits roll. Together, Stewart and O’Brian form a formidable duo, their chemistry igniting the screen with a palpable intensity that is impossible to ignore.

Love Lies Bleeding is a film that defies easy categorization, blending elements of romance, crime, and suspense into a heady cocktail of cinematic brilliance. From its pulse-pounding action sequences to its moments of quiet introspection, every frame is imbued with a sense of urgency and authenticity that keeps viewers on the edge of their seats.

However, this is not a film for the faint of heart. As the narrative unfolds, viewers are plunged into a world of moral ambiguity and moral ambiguity, where the line between right and wrong becomes increasingly blurred. It’s a testament to the film’s fearless storytelling and uncompromising vision, challenging audiences to confront uncomfortable truths and examine the complexities of love, loyalty, and identity.

In celebrating its narrative richness and thematic complexity, Love Lies Bleeding also stands as a powerful testament to LGBTQIA+ representation in cinema, offering a poignant and authentic portrayal of queer love and identity. It’s a film that demands to be seen, celebrated and remembered as a shining example of the transformative power of cinema.

Kristen Stewart
Movie Reviews

NEWS... BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT

Kristen Stewart, 34, reveals crush on ‘hot’ co-star, 73, in Love Lies Bleeding

Share this with

Katy O'Brian as Jackie and Kristen Stewart as Lou in Love Lies Bleeding

‘How do I feel about bodies?’ asks Kristen Stewart, sipping her water and looking the picture of millennial health .

‘I could never really relate to people hitting the gym constantly so they can be the hottest that they can possibly be. It’s just not something I’ve ever really been attracted to. It’s weird to work out like that so obsessively. But then also I have become kind of obsessed with working out…so I get it. It’s like an adrenaline rush…you get into it.’

The petite Stewart – who found fame as Bella Swan in the Twilight films before gaining an Oscar nod for her Princess Diana in Spencer – doesn’t exactly look like a gym bunny; rather, this newfound love of toning up has come from her new movie, Love Lies Bleeding. This rip-roaring thriller sees her play Lou, the manager of a New Mexico gym who falls for female bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brian); it’s a relationship that soon goes south when they become embroiled with Lou’s grimy criminal family.

‘It does feel good to know your own strength,’ continues Stewart, 34, when we meet in Berlin’s famed five-star Adlon Hotel. ‘It feels nice to inhabit every inch of your body. I think in our movie, I play someone who tries to take up as little space as she possibly can. She’s almost ceasing to exist. And then she watches this woman roll through town larger than life, audaciously and unabashedly not denying herself.’ Before long, the dead bodies start piling up as an incident of domestic violence leads to revenge and retribution.

Stewart, who identifies as bisexual, is delighted that crime stories with a Queer perspective are getting made, with Love Lies Bleeding following the recent lesbian caper comedy Drive-Away Dolls starring Margaret Qualley. ‘We’re inviting people to find voice and volition,’ she says. ‘And we’re trying to create space for alternative perspectives. But we also function within an industry that wants to make money. And it’s hard to get anything off the ground that hasn’t been proven…it’s really hard to be the first of anything.’

Stewart, who famously dated her Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson for several years, admits to having a bit of a crush on Ed Harris, the 73-year-old four-time Oscar-nominee and star of The Truman Show, who plays Lou’s pony-tailed father, the nefarious owner of a gun range. ‘He really doesn’t disappoint. He is a soulful and poetic Marlboro Man. He is the coolest s**t kicker. He’s such a dude. He’s such a man, like so masculine, and, like, hot. And nice and truly aware of everyone on set.’

According to Stewart, Harris was initially uncertain about the film, co-written and directed by British filmmaker Rose Glass (Saint Maud). ‘Admittedly [he] didn’t really like the script, said that he had played the part before but just thought that Rose was kind of such a freak…he was like, “I want to help you do whatever you’re doing. But I don’t really get this one.” And then afterwards, recently, he was like, “Well, this one really came together. I’m shocked!” But he’s just so nice. He straight up underlines the idea that he was providing a service…and ultimately, he does like the movie. He really does like it.’

Set at the tail-end of the 1980s, the film also takes on the hot-button issue of guns in America, something Stewart doesn’t mind admitting she was uncomfortable with. ‘I really dislike firing a gun,’ she says. ‘Have you ever been to a gun range?’ Growing up in a country like America gave her food for thought. ‘It’s tough because we are violent. I mean, undeniably, it’s how we have actually covered the globe. There’s no way to avoid the truth of the violence in humanity. I mean, Goddamn, f*****g America, man! So scary, it’s horrible.’

Born in Los Angeles, Stewart was raised in the heart of Hollywood; her father John worked as a stage manager and television producer while her mother Jules was a script supervisor. By the age of 10, she was on screen in The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, a bit part. But soon she was alongside Jodie Foster in Panic Room and being hailed as a major new discovery.

To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video

As for her opinions on America, perhaps because her mother hails from Australia, the articulate actress has always taken a sideways view on her birth country. Take America’s ideologies, like the idea that anything is possible.

‘That is a nice notion, and sometimes it can be true, but that’s not a fact,’ says Stewart. ‘And not everyone is going to be a winner. And there’s a real violent fall from that. There’s an emptiness to that, that is kind of devastating, ultimately. Because affirmations are nice. We definitely need to love each other in order to be loved and we need to like build each other up and all of that is true, but you got to be careful…it’s a slippery slope.’

With Love Lies Bleeding ready to come out, Stewart is now working on her debut feature as a director. After shooting several music videos and short films, including 2017’s Come Swim, she’s now making the step up by taking on The Chronology of Water, based on 2011 memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, which examines the author’s bisexuality and addiction issues. ‘People have been anticipating this directorial debut for a long time, embarrassingly,’ says Stewart, who has been talking it up for years while seeking financing, ‘but what ends up inevitably happening…the movie has only gotten better over this period of time.’

So next stop Latvia, which she will film the project with Imogen Poots in the lead. ‘I was not allowed to make my movie in the States, it was too expensive, it was too hard, there were too many big fat no’s in my face,’ she says. But always the Indie Queen, rather than the Hollywood starlet, Stewart is desperate to call ‘action’ on the film. ‘It takes a long time to really believe in it and actually build the wherewithal to say, “I deserve millions of dollars and a hundred man crew!” That is a f*****g crazy thing to claim. And here we are…I’m so excited.’

Love Lies Bleeding opens in cinemas on May 3rd.

Got a story?

If you’ve got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the Metro.co.uk entertainment team by emailing us [email protected], calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we’d love to hear from you.

MORE : Hollywood director’s wife files for divorce after 30 years

MORE : Planet of the Apes cast ‘degraded’ by TikTok star in fumbled interview

MORE : Tom Holland reveals nasty injury that forced him to miss red carpet moment with Zendaya

Get us in your feed

COMMENTS

'Spencer' Review: Kristen Stewart in a Masterly Princess Diana Movie
'Spencer' Review: Kristen Stewart Transforms in Pablo Larraín's Masterly Princess Diana Movie Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (In Competition), Sept. 3, 2021. MPAA Rating: Not rated.
Review: 'Spencer' gives Princess Diana, and Kristen Stewart, a second
In 'Spencer,' Kristen Stewart's Princess Diana grasps for reality in order to survive. Kristen Stewart plays Diana in a very different vision of an imagined moment in her life. Pablo Larraín's ...
Spencer
Tony C Kristen Stewart's transformation becoming Princess Diana is remarkably convincing. Rated 4.5/5 Stars • Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 01/25/22 Full Review David H First of all, I couldn't ...
Spencer movie review & film summary (2021)
Pablo Larraín's "Spencer" is a haunting reimagining of a tense Christmas holiday in the life of Princess Diana.Knowing this will not fully prepare you for what you're about to watch. Larraín's vision is full of dream sequences, internal and externalized pain, metaphor-heavy dialogue, and Kristen Stewart brooding sensationally under various hats and Diana's signature short bob ...
Spencer review: Kristen Stewart dazzles in Princess Diana biopic
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 ...
Spencer (2021)
Spencer: Directed by Pablo Larraín. With Kristen Stewart, Timothy Spall, Sally Hawkins, Jack Nielen. Diana Spencer, struggling with mental-health problems during her Christmas holidays with the Royal Family at their Sandringham estate in Norfolk, England, decides to end her decade-long marriage to Prince Charles.
Kristen Stewart in Princess Diana Biopic 'Spencer': Film Review
September 3, 2021 7:15am. Kristen Stewart in 'Spencer' Venice Film Festival. Any film in which a woman who left an indelible mark on the popular culture of the late 20th century finds comfort in ...
Spencer review: Kristin Stewart stars in Princess Diana's ...
The Kristen Stewart movie Spencer is more real-life horror story than Princess Di biopic ... This Spencer review was originally published in conjunction with the film's screening at the 2021 ...
Spencer Film Review: Kristen Stewart's Princess Diana Is Brilliant and
Diana herself is driving up in a racing green Porsche and gets lost, stopping to ask directions in a local greasy-spoon cafe (fish and chips cost £2.70) where the diners and staff soon fall ...
Spencer First Reviews: Kristen Stewart is "Mesmerizing" in Princess
One of the most intriguing biopics in years, Spencer stars American actress Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana, a world-famous figure who has already been portrayed many times before (including recently in the acclaimed fourth season of The Crown).This time, Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín is at the helm and the first reviews out of the Venice Film Festival are praising Spencer as a fitting ...
'Spencer' review: Kristen Stewart is a hauntingly great Princess Diana
2:17. With a stellar performance from Kristen Stewart, director Pablo Larraín's supremely brilliant "Spencer" is an enlightening glimpse into the mind of Princess Diana that doubles as an ...
"Spencer" and "Hive," Reviewed
Anthony Lane reviews Pablo Larraín's movie "Spencer," a fantastical bio-pic about Princess Diana, starring Kristen Stewart, and Blerta Basholli's "Hive," a Kosovan film about a woman ...
Spencer review
Kristen Stewart's entirely compelling Di has no escape from the dress-up game of monarchy in Pablo Larraín's unreverential movie Xan Brooks Fri 3 Sep 2021 10.15 EDT Last modified on Fri 3 Sep ...
'Spencer' review: Kristen Stewart embodies Princess Diana scarily well
In Spencer, an artistic, pensive movie focused on a three-day Christmas stint at the Sandringham Estate, where the royal family traditionally spends the holiday, Kristen Stewart ( Twilight, The ...
'Spencer' review: Kristen Stewart is hauntingly brilliant as Princess Diana
TORONTO — Director Pablo Larraín took a big gamble when he cast Kristen Stewart in a role as weighty and revered as Princess Diana. The Chilean's game of royal roulette has paid off. Because ...
'Spencer' review: Kristen Stewart gives the performance of her life as
You should know that about "Spencer," only in theaters, in which LA-born Kristen Stewart gives the performance of her life as Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales. Oscar should smile on Stewart ...
Spencer Review: Kristen Stewart Delivers an Immense Performance
'Spencer,' which revolves around Kristen Stewart's Princess Diana, is more ghost story than biopic in a haunting reimagining of real life events. 'Spencer' is a very good movie that flirts with ...
'Spencer' review: Casting of Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana is
Movie review. The sad saga of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, seems destined to be told from numerous lenses: At the moment, you can choose from a television version ("The Crown," from ...
Spencer review
Spencer review - Kristen Stewart's Diana impersonation is enjoyably strange. Pablo Larraín's overwrought fantasy, set during a stifling royal Christmas in 1991, offers an arthouse-bizarro ...
Spencer (film)
Spencer is a 2021 historical psychological drama film directed by Pablo Larraín from a screenplay by Steven Knight.The film is about Princess Diana's existential crisis during the Christmas of 1991, as she considers divorcing Prince Charles and leaving the British royal family. Kristen Stewart and Jack Farthing star as Diana and Charles respectively, Freddie Spry and Jack Neilen as Prince ...
Spencer movie reviews praise Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana
First. Spencer. reactions hail Kristen Stewart as Oscar frontrunner in a 'f--- you to the royal family'. Stewart's turn as Princess Diana earns rave reviews out of Venice for Pablo Larraín's ...
Movie Review: Kristen Stewart resurrects Diana
Movie Review: Kristen Stewart resurrects Diana — "Spencer". "Spencer" is nothing less than the reinvention of Kristen Stewart. Her portrayal of a troubled, mercurial, vain and bitter Diana, Princess of Wales is that startling, that much of a career-reset. Her performance starts with an uncanny impersonation — the way Diana held her ...
'Spencer' Review: Kristen Stewart Slips Into Princess Diana
For all its impressive formal swings, the film's aura of repetitive, notes-on-a-theme fatalism can wear thin over time, which is very much the point. In that respect, Larraín shows his cards in ...
Kristen Stewart Is Starring In A New Vampire Thriller And We ...
Cue the ominous Twilight music. Kristen Stewart just landed a new movie role that might make her once again have a thirst for blood, cold to the touch, and insanely fast. That's right, Kristen ...
Love Lies Bleeding review
Violent story of extreme sport, forbidden love and a lot of murder could be a new grindhouse classic, but Stewart's fierce subtlety pushes it up a level Peter Bradshaw Thu 2 May 2024 04.00 EDT ...
Love Lies Bleeding review: Kristen Stewart lives up to internet hype
Set in the late 80s, Katy O'Brien (The Mandalorian) stars as Jackie, a promising bodybuilder drifting her way to Vegas for a big content. She picks up a job at a small-town shooting range run by ...
Love Lies Bleeding review: Kristen Stewart's lesbian crime thriller is
Love Lies Bleeding is the kind of weird little film they don't make anymore. Vile, bombastic, and slicked with sweat, this turbo-charged lesbian crime thriller is the second offering from ...
Kristen Stewart says Hollywood's work with few women 'feels phony'
Kristen Stewart wants Hollywood to stop congratulating itself for making movies with women: 'It feels phony' The "Love Lies Bleeding" star is preparing to direct her first film.
Love Lies Bleeding Review: Kristen Stewart Sets Screen on Fire ...
Love Lies Bleeding Review: In the realm of cinema, where conformity often reigns supreme, Love Lies Bleeding emerges as a beacon of audacity and originality, transcending genres and defying expectations. Produced by the acclaimed A24, this electrifying film catapults viewers into a world where passion and danger collide with devastating consequences.
Kristen Stewart, 34, reveals crush on her 'hot' 73-year-old ...
The petite Stewart - who found fame as Bella Swan in the Twilight films before gaining an Oscar nod for her Princess Diana in Spencer - doesn't exactly look like a gym bunny; rather, this ...