Avis des critiques

No doubt it took an outsider to make a film that’s as unreverential as Spencer, which dares to examine the royals as if they were specimens under glass. At heart, of course, Larraín and Knight’s tale is utterly preposterous.

“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.

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.

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.

Here Larrain dives fully into horror movie terrain, shooting fantasy scenes of self-torture... and mental disintegration... and there’s even supernatural visitation from the ghost of Anne Boleyn... The touchstone here is The Shining, with Sandringham as the Overlook Hotel, filled with endless corridors of evil.

A more than persuasive companion piece to Larraín’s previous portrait of a female icon in crisis, 2016’s Jackie, the film plays with and deconstructs the familiar repertoire of Diana myths and images, to offer an empathetic, intelligent insight into the prison of fame and privilege, with Kristen Stewart offering a lead performance that is brittle, tender, sometimes playful and not a little uncanny.

There has been an endless examination and fascination towards Diana. Lorrain and Stewart however have excavated her soul, and, in the end, presented what we should most want to remember.

A heavy-handed screenplay from Stephen Knight (Peaky Blinders) makes much of it painfully on-the-nose. Everything is overstated, repeated, and foreshadowed in bold font.

Not everything works. The upstairs-downstairs mechanics are overly familiar – food prepared with military precision, dogs being walked – as much from Downton Abbey as The Crown... But at its most successful the film is a compelling picture of a troubled young woman in a hostile environment at the heart of the British state.

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. Its main infraction, though, is that it is often witless and banal, leaving Larraín and the actors to heroically milk the drama from a string of interactions that are either overstuffed with “meaning”, or just deathly dull.

With its Grand Guignol and horror movie tropes... 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.

Spencer isn’t called Windsor, and its focus rests on its heroine alone. But what a heroine – and what thrillingly gutsy, seductive, uninhibited filmmaking this is.