Spencer

Directed by Pablo Larrain. 2021

Let’s talk about throwing up…

Throwing up is urgent and bodily, but sometimes the culmination of something being quietly wrong for some time. Something is in the wrong place and the alarm has been sounded, but for now it is just a low rumbling in a distant room, and it will be a while before any violent reckoning.

Pablo Larrain’s Spencer is in part about throwing up. It follows Kristen Stewart’s Diana over Christmas with the royal household at Sandringham in 1991, during which she is often trying to be sick. The film knows that food, even when each plate is so delicate and prepared by such a friendly cook, can be a violence – so it sits with the character’s bulimia until we understand how mealtimes, like almost every aspect of this excruciating 3-days, are turned on Diana like the thumbscrews, applying increasing pressure in the hope she’ll become pliable. The story being told is about Diana’s will to frustrate those forces, and advocate for herself and her children, and as she is more extremely isolated and gaslit we fear she’ll get too exhausted to resist.

But I think Spencer is that type of convulsion as well. Diana is always in the wrong place: coming into the dining room too late so she interrupts a choreography of elegantly jacketed servers, last in place for a family photo and crossing the lens, stumbling with hands up into the line of rifle fire during the boxing day shoot. She’s on the toilet floor when she should be at the table, and raiding the fridge when she should be in bed. She’s rounded up by police with guns and torches for venturing too close to an outer wall late at night. These are the stomach cramps that let you know all is not well, and tell of something terrible to come.

You’re thinking ‘get out Diana! Get out! GET OUT! RUN! LEAVE!’ But we know she can’t. She’s trapped. Or that she can and will (eventually), but not really. Never really. Or we think we do.

There’s a nice moment at the start of the film when a fleet of armoured vehicles, delivering food for the holiday, hurtle down this pristine gravel road – tall trees on either side. But they’re charging towards a dead pheasant lying in the way. It’s a trick of perspective that had me going 3 or 4 times as each truck juddered past, but you’re sure they’re going to run the pheasant over, leaving it’s body flattened and feathers matted into the stones. And when one doesn’t, you’re doubly sure the next will. But no, it rushes past again, making the dead bird’s tail feathers flap in the breeze.

Well, Spencer resolves itself like that. People have been writing about the film as pulling on elements of horror cinema to build its sense of foreboding, and it does that wonderfully. You have been so excellently prepared for the final, horrible convulsion – by Jonny Greenwood’s astonishing score that holds in tension romantic and hellish strings, and by photography by Claire Mathon which is coolly distanced one minute, and then so deeply subjective it starts to feel unsafe – but when it comes it’s not morbid at all. It’s revelatory. And that feels radical to me.

Larrain’s Diana does gets to run, with her children, and now we see in her face the prospect of a different life. ‘All you need is love’, Sally Hawkins’ Maggie says to her in the dual role of dresser and confidant, and we think here is someone brave enough to go towards that. The film doesn’t concern itself with the after we know is coming for the character – which I wonder if many of us expect the moment we hear her name? And which has threatened to make Diana like a walking ghost in her own story throughout. It holds that moment of hope for the future, and pride.