Spencer
During her Christmas holidays with the royal family at the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, England, Diana decides to leave her marriage to Prince Charles.
- Released: 2021-11-04
- Runtime: 117 minutes
- Genre: Drama, History
- Stars: Kristen Stewart, Jack Farthing, Sally Hawkins, Timothy Spall, Sean Harris, Thomas Douglas, Olga Hellsing, Matthias Wolkowski, Oriana Gordon, Ryan Wichert, John Keogh, Amy Manson, Elizabeth Berrington, Jack Nielen, Freddie Spry, Stella Gonet, Richard Sammel, Lore Stefanek, James Harkness, Laura Benson, Wendy Patterson, Libby Rodliffe, Niklas Kohrt
- Director: Pablo Larraín
Comments
- lazomelinda - 25 June 2024
Garbage
This movie is an absolute piece of garbage!! Terrible casting, terrible script, not a single positive about it. Dreadful. How someone can write such garbage about someone's life and pass it off as a biographical film is a joke. She is portrayed as unhinged and insane. This does not mention all the good she did throughout her struggles within that institution, it is a gross representation of her life and an insult to her memory and to her legacy. Shame on all involved in writing this crap and to all those involved. Utter garbage and I regret watching this crap and the fact I cannot unsee it upsets me greatly. - MattyLuke-81663 - 24 November 2023
"Will they kill me, do you think?"
Don't go into 'Spencer' expecting an ordinary little biopic about Princess Diana. Nope, this is a straight-up psychological art house horror thriller. 'Spencer' brilliantly captures the feeling of dread in an isolated foreign space surrounded by strangers. The royal family themselves are freaking creepy, always watching, always judging.
I must be honest, I wasn't a big fan of Kristen Stewart's recent work, as it never wowed me, and I wasn't convinced that she's improved since Twilight. But man, she's fantastic in this movie and it's one of her best performances to date. Stewart manages to portray Princess Diana in a new light that we haven't really seen before. In my opinion, her other movies failed to show her versatility as an actor, and I fully believe this movie did her justice. I'm just glad this movie won me over.
On the other hand, Timothy Spall is excellent in this movie and another stand-out performance. If you are aware of Spall as an actor, then this isn't surprising news, but I feel it needs repeating. I found him very eerie and overbearing. He plays a man with an eagle eye; he watches everything and everyone in the royal family at Sandringham House.
The major thing that this movie made me realise is that in Diana's life, it's the people that kept her mentally and emotionally grounded. Her two sons, her assistant (Sally Hawkins, who is very good in the small scenes she has), and the chef played by Sean Harris, who is someone you would not think of as being important.
Sean Harris is a very underrated actor that I wish people talked about more. Harris is known for playing sinister roles, but here I thought he was really sweet and showed a softer side. He's got an interesting-sounding voice as well.
Jack Farthing as Prince Charles does a great job playing a slimy over-privileged Prince. Stella Gonet as the Queen who I found really unsettling, especially her dagger eyes.
There's one scene at the dinner table with the other royal family that is one of the most intense things ever. It was anxiety level stress that made my heart racing. All thanks to Pablo Larraín claustrophobic and unique directing. Complimented by Johnny Greenwood's atmospheric, free-flowing, and tense score.
While I know that certain elements of the movie are fiction, then again, the movie begins with a title card "based on a tragic fable" and I feel like the movie is playing into the nightmarish fair tale of an iconic figure in history. Diana's life in royalty was no fairy tale, but a Brothers Grimm tale.
Overall rating: The movie has metaphors for ghosts, ghosts of the past, and ghosts of old traditions. People who follow tradition aren't too kind to rarity. Great movie. - bricslove - 1 June 2023
lol, these people think they're still an empire
(Disclaimer : This is not just about the movie but what the way it has been received tells me about those who have seen it, so be warned.)
And that is what's pathetic and crazy. The weirdest and most unique part of this otherwise crap movie for me is how it struck the chav country where it hurts. Doesn't matter if they portrayed Di right or wrong because nearly all movies with a claim to truth are darned dirty, ugly, shameless, patronizing propagandas that are full to the brim with lies which they spew one after another at your face, while feigning concern for humanity. I've watched stuff that made me gag and who the flying frack is Diana for me to be concerned about how she was portrayed?
The movie: mediocre, boring, one dimensional, without substance, and has the homo push in the end for a sec, but in the least annoying kind of way. ("you need shock, laughter, you need love" - that's something no one can debate, although no one cares about the poor woman who's just there to decorate the main character, geez this sort of stuff disgusts me in ways I cannot tell)
Nice cinematography, horror theme in soundtrack that I thought was well fitting and nice piano pieces at the right places, etc.
The only redeeming quality of the movie is its way, although still too diplomatic, of questioning the ability to preserve your sanity surrounded in a place ridden of self important jerks who think they excrete their stink in pink. Gets better when you know that their only relevance is their knee-deep existence in globalists' defrauding the system they had once built and shoved down the world's throat as bankster gangster leftovers of all monarchies (This is not pertinent to and thus went unsaid in the movie but there was this supposedly touchy "all we are is currency" talk by the queen which too was impertinent. If you're going to make your movie about Diana, you cannot really pose the "Us this really for the country?" question. If you posed it, however, and ended up in "face on banknote", then you're being a coward. Do the whole deal or shut up forever.)
But these people a.k.a some of the audience to whom the movie matters in a very, very pathetic way, think they're still an empire. Not only that but as the fond subjects of the empire, they also seem to be proud of what their monarchy stands for and its colonial past and the "democracy" it's been imposing on sovereign nations with its bastard child over the pond, leading the way.
So much so that they need a third wheel of it to be portrayed with "justice". What a nice way and place to waste those feelings of justice and easily believe in your own effort to restore it.
Ofc, then, such a third wheel would be called names by its deluded subjects if she or he is to stop holding all the bull in and start acting out, even if for personal reasons. Because if, in the global scale, what matters to you isn't who's in the right but your benefits on the side by proxy and your deludedly vicarious enjoyment of power wielded by people who have never represented you but themselves... If you're such a brownnosing sycophant of a slave in your mind yourself, then you will call the proper reaction to an action "pathetic", "spoiled" and who knows what else. That's how you stand having to look at your own face in the mirror. That's how you deny your own lack of power and the geographically decided chance factor that lets you be able to deny it.
This movie wouldn't have been so bad if it crammed up Stewart's portrayal of Di into half an hour max, along with the whole package which only digs ambience-deep at her personality by presenting a psychologically challenging setting that's exacerbated even more by the vagueness of the allusions to a personal past. It's very much lacking in substance, it doesn't stimulate your mirror neurons nearly enough to trigger your empathy.
If it could do that, though, then doing it without appealing to the audience's needs to identify with and root for the main character would have been the real challenge. An effort to do this would then claim the rest of the time the movie took to waste for a portrayal that's almost as relevant as a first impression and put it to good use, or they could have died trying, I don't know.
It's the director and the screenwriter's fault to make the main sctress look like the queen of try-hards. It's the story that is two dimensional and two dimensional stories don't offer actors enough material to work with so as to ease them into the shoes of the characters.
So the 3 stars are for cinematography, the scores and the question: Would you be able to live with such turds just to upkeep a charade and stay healthy? - etms - 12 November 2022
Curious checklist to enjoy this film
If you:- like films shot on film (the way Cinema is supposed to be by the way...) and don't mind "small gauge" like 16mm and its strong grain
- love jazz fusion (mixed here with some experimental soundtrack, because wtf why not)
- really don't give a damn about the "real" Royal Family story.
- don't care about biopics either
- slow (enough) paste where we take our time to tell a story without explosion every 2 secs
- and really appreciate Kristen Stewart
I'm glad I miraculously checked all those improbable and curious list of conditions. - samtimoney-79758 - 26 September 2022
Had potential
The premise of this film had potential. It was a decent idea However it was written and delivered poorly. The sets/locations felt hollow and just like they were going around a museum the whole time. It felt cheaply made, it also felt like a film that was made in the 2000, as if it was something that had already been done 10 years ago. Another downer is that nothing really happened, I mean literally NOTHING happened. It also had very unbelievable and over the top moments in it. When it comes to a show about royalty like The Crown, it's enjoyable because it is sensible, it FEELS right. This film some how lacked its feeling. That acting was decent, however what the actors were given to work with was dreadful; the scripts, the story, the screenplay. Whoever filmed this should be shot ! Just dreadful camera usage.
As I'm writing this review I'm trying to think of things I liked to make it fair. However, this film was a patch work of a lot of very average moments and some really bad ones. There weren't any 'good' or 'memorable' moments. I just think they could of done better.
5.5/10 from me.
