The first time I watched Spencer, Pablo Larraín’s 2021 psychological drama surrounding what I’d call the saddest scandal of the British monarchy, I felt my heart drop. The film begins as Princess Diana, played by Kristen Stewart, speeds down a quiet country lane with a map in hand and the convertible roof drawn. The view is peaceful, the music is calm, and Diana looks so undeniably free — I was sick to my stomach.
Because everyone knows what happens to the real Princess Diana.
On August 30, 1997, her life was ended by a fatal car crash. Her death, mourned by many, has become inseparable from her life. It’s in the past, a universal knowledge that colors her story every time it gets retold. And, as one watches Spencer over 20 years later, one cannot help but do so through the shadow of her demise.
Princess Diana is driving a car, and, one day, that car is going to crash.
I could barely watch. Anxiety lept to my throat. I felt for this woman who I did not know, yet who I knew did not die for another six years after the events of this film. And still, I was scared for her. I was unable to separate her present and past, unable to detangle this moment from the end I knew was coming. I could not see Princess Diana without, in some way, remembering that she no longer exists. Larraín uses this awareness of the Princess’s untimely death to his advantage, as he melds Diana’s past, present, and ever-looming future into a cinematic meditation on tragedy and time.
The entirety of Spencer takes place over three days on Christmas weekend, 1991. In the midst of her marital breakdown, Diana joins the rest of the royal family at the Sandringham estate, a monarchical homestead located just a courtyard away from her childhood home. The majority of the film unfolds in this space, which acts as a constant geographical reflection of Diana’s current lifetime. Her childhood sits on one side, boarded up and locked away, and Sandringham sits on the other. Sandringham is her present, and yet it’s also the site of an ancient past. As Diana states, “the dust in [that] house… almost certainly contains the dead skin of every person who’s ever stayed in it.” The remnants of long dead kings and queens live on in the unfiltered air, and the past is breathed in by the monarchs of the present.
The British monarchy, as it’s presented in Spencer, exists as a monolith. Characters throughout the film, both inside and outside the royal family, speak of the monarchy as currency. It’s a representation of itself, where the aesthetic whole is more important than its individual parts. When an oath is made, it is made to the monarchy as a living, breathing thing. When one enters the royal family, as Diana did, they are absorbed into that singularity. They become part of the unchanging and unrelenting tradition that is Britain. By joining the royal family and then placing herself within the Sandringham estate, Diana has melded her own present with the inescapable lifetime of Britain itself. She, a newly collected jewel of the monarchy, becomes Britain; Britain’s past becomes her own. And, in a house filled with both royal dust and the ghosts that come with it, that past is likely to repeat itself.
The most obvious of these repetitions is represented by the sporadic presence of Anne Boleyn (Amy Manson) throughout Diana’s time at Sandringham. First seen after she reads a novel on the executed queen, a number of connections are quickly drawn between the two women, both of whom died young after their husbands, members of the royal family, began an affair with another woman and ended their marriage to pursue another. With each sighting of the apparition, the two become harder to separate. Diana begins to repeat Anne’s words within dreams, speaking them softly as if they were her own. During Christmas dinner, as she runs down the hall and helplessly repeats the phrase “tell them I am not well”, their two faces begin to meld. Anne and Diana, both scapegoats of the British monarchy born hundreds of years apart, become one being. The past and present are both held within a singular frame, and each of them is draped in extravagant pearls.
The pearls Diana wears throughout Spencer are a Christmas gift from her husband, Prince Charles (Jack Farthing). Unfortunately, they’re also the same pearls he gave to Camilla Parker Bowles. Just as Anne Boleyn was replaced by Jane Seymour, Diana’s husband begins an affair with Camilla and eventually marries her after Diana’s death. Like Boleyn, Diana is blamed for her failing marriage, with the British press constantly questioning her own faithfulness. And, just as Diana is haunted by Anne Boleyn, she’s also haunted by the presence of Camilla, a Seymour of the modern day. She sees the pattern. She knows her place in this repetitious history. The past repeats itself in the present, and the two are never that far apart.
So far, I’ve spoken heavily on both present and past, of their connection to one another and how Spencer uses this connection to place Princess Diana within a twisted web of her own lifetime. However, we haven’t spoken much on our third and final tense— the future.
Spencer states its viewpoint on all of these verbal tenses directly in its dialogue when Diana discusses the nature of grammar at Sandringham with her two young sons. “Here,” she says, “there is only one tense. There is no future. The past and the present are the same thing.”
And it’s true: There can be no real future here, because we, the audience, already know it. Six years after this film takes place, Diana, Princess of Wales, is going to die — just as Anne Boleyn died before her. That event inevitably happens, has happened, and will happen again after Christmas is through. Diana Spencer will die, tragically.
However, within his version of the story, Larraín allows her to make the choice.
When Diana is finally able to enter her childhood home, when she stands, poised, at the top of its broken stair and prepares to accept the sweet escape of death, she once again sees Anne Boleyn. Boleyn, who speaks in calming tones of a necklace given to her and her husband’s next wife by the same man. She wore it dutifully, until she tore it off. “Go,” she says. “Run.”
The music crescendos, and we see Diana, clear-cut against a blinding, blue sky. She’s wearing yellow, a nearly identical outfit to her childhood self. She smiles and walks inside. Now she’s in a wedding dress. Then a mourner’s gown. Then a ballet leotard. Diana’s entire life flashes before our eyes, and it all exists within two houses, only a courtyard apart. Timelines mingle, Diana meets Diana for only a moment, her children appear for only a moment; she runs, but she does not leave. There is only the past and present. There is no future. There is only this and now, two houses connected by a single lane. So Diana tears off the necklace, and Anne Boleyn is gone.
It’s a cycle, right? Anne tore off the necklace; Diana tore off the necklace. Anne died; Diana will die. It’s tragic and obvious and ancient and new. The monolith lives on, Diana or no Diana. She was warned by the ghost of Boleyn herself, and she still chose to follow in her footsteps. But why?
Luckily for us, the story doesn’t end there.
The end of Spencer is marked by a series of actions Diana makes that directly reject tradition, but they are not selfish actions. They are not actions she takes alone either, as she has been for most of the story so far. Instead, they are for and with her children.
When given the chance to leave Sandringham with her dresser, Maggie (Sally Hawkins), Diana chooses to return. She leaves her old clothing upon a childhood scarecrow, a monument to herself, and walks back to her tragic present, knowing well how it will end — knowing that there is no future, not for her anyway. But maybe there can be for her children. If she can just save them, stop the hunt and take them away from this house, buy them regular junk food and show them the river and play a pop song instead of some classical dribble, maybe she can stop the cycle. She’s accepted her fate, by order of Anne Boleyn, so that she might change the future she cannot have.
There’s a story, mentioned in the film, about a Scotsman who owned an untamable horse. The man was a soldier in Belfast, and, to calm his allies, he told them different tales about the beast. “But then,” he had said, “one fine morning…” — the man was shot before he could finish his sentence.
If that bullet hadn’t come, maybe we would know what happened to the Scotsman’s wild horse. Maybe she would have been tamed, maybe she wouldn’t, but that story doesn’t get a real end. Instead, it ends by force. A bullet to the brain stops it dead in its tracks, and we’ll never know the end.
But we can see what it’s done.
The man who tells that story within Spencer, or retells it, is an agent of the British monolith. His eyes are their eyes, his words often their words, but he takes his own moment to rebel. The book. Anne Boleyn. They were left for Diana by this statue of a man, all decorum and dignity. It’s a small action, defiant, a ripple against the tyranny of a constant stream. It’s also the beginning of Diana’s end, an end that provides its own beginning. Story alters story, until the time between them becomes meaningless. They become pieces of one another, tragedies that incite tragedies in the hopes of breaking free.
Diana Spencer, in any story, is incapable of a future. Her death is defined, timeless and certain. But the future her tragedy builds is yet to come. Our own future, the future of her living children, is still unknown. In Spencer, Pablo Larraín gives Diana a space in that future — a decisive and active choice. Her life ends as it does because she wills it to. She rips off the pearls, ignoring the warning of those who came before, but it is her decision, not that of the monolith. Within this version of Diana’s life, inseparable from its end, the princess finds her agency and builds a better future she’ll never get to see.
