As one would expect from Pablo Larraín, this is an extremely competent and intriguing piece of film-making. Authentic it is not.
The Chilean director flags this up at the start: 'A fable based on a true tragedy'. He's giving us a Diana, not the Diana, along with a version of modern royalty.
The setting, supposedly the Queen's Sandringham estate at Christmas 1991, is a grand, Baroque (and very) German castle — Schloss Nordkirchen, aka the Versailles of Westphalia — and the goings on inside immediately reminded me of some of the opening scenes of Marie Antoinette (2006) by Sofia Coppola.
The effect felt to me like a spoken, somewhat gothic opera, serving as a vehicle for several set-piece duets with well-crafted, almost too cute and metaphor-laden lyrics.*
The excellent score from Jonny Greenwood leans towards jazzy discordance.
There's an out-of-place ghost from the past — Ann Boleyn — though at times one also glimpses a ghost from the future, that tense we learn doesn't exist for majesty: Meghan.
I tried to get it into my head that this wasn't history, but struggled from start to finish.
The 'POW' protagonist is depthless. And Kristen Stewart's attempts to replicate her coyness and listing head can really become irritating. Yet her performance, rather like the drama around her, has moments when it is uncannily precise.
Everything feels contrived, except in those fleeting moments when it doesn't, and for that reason I am going to have to say that the film didn't really work for me overall. This may not be such an issue for those with fewer personal memories.
My mother's step-sister Joan, Baroness Mischcon, had a close-ish relationship with the Diana of that period — she was married to the lawyer whose counsel the Princess sought shortly after the events depicted — and would surely have found this caricature synthetic at best.
Sean Harris has suddenly emerged as one of our major big screen thesps, on a par here with the likes of Sally Hawkins and Timothy Spall.
* Oddly enough Joseph Losey's Don Giovanni (1979) was another movie that sprung into my head while watching Spencer.
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