Rent Spencer (2021)

Didn't enjoy - Spencer review by GH

I couldn't watch this through to the end. Although the part of Diana was well acted, it was pretty impossible to hear what she was saying. Maybe the soundtrack on this DVD wasn't the best, but Diana spoke in a mumbling whisper throughout the film, and found most of the characters totally unlikeable.

Why? - Spencer review by DH

Dreadful. One of those films where you keep expecting something to happen, but nothing ever does. The Charles character was rubbish, and the Queen seemed to have taken a vow of silence. Phillip didn't even get a look in.

Dreadful - Spencer review by LC

A truly terrible film. It's slow, the plot is nonsensical, all the characters are absurd clichés, Kirsten Stewart is just plain annoying. It really has nothing going for it at all.

Lady Di has a hard time at the palace. - Spencer review by MD

I don't know, maybe I don't understand the life at the palace, but I kept thinking why doesn't she just do her own thing and ignore the other royals and their customs and ceremonies. The background music was hideous.

Royal psychodrama beautifully played by Kristen Stewart - Spencer review by PD

Perhaps one of those things that might have done better by being about a fictional character that we would have drawn comparisons to Diana, but this is still hugely enjoyable none the less, with a captivating performance from Kristen Stewart. She's on the edge of hysteria from the start - jittery, brittle, often abrasively defensive and yet deeply vulnerable in a film that puts her through a psychological wringer with shadings of outright horror. It's a world away from 'The Crown', for whilst the script certainly doesn’t lack compassion for the tragic figure at the centre of the whirlpool, the writer and director also make a lot of gutsy choices that deliberately put her at a distance from us — as Diana herself describes it in the film, like an insect under a microscope with its wings being tweezed off. Taking Diana’s maiden name as its title makes sense given that the Sandringham House weekend brings her back to the same estate where she spent her childhood in a neighbouring home - the arc of the film following her wrestling with the decision to stay and endure the agony of imprisonment in an artificial world that has proven inhospitable to her, or to bolt for freedom and reclaim her selfhood (although the film avoids the inevitable fact that this will mean sacrificing her children, which presumably must have been part of her mental torture in real life). Beautifully shot throughout, the opening of a simple shot of frost thick on the ground is an admittedly obvious but nevertheless apt metaphor for the reception that awaits Diana, and the first words we hear from her are “Where the fuck am I?,” muttered while she puzzles over a map. The regimented protocols of the royal holiday weekend are very well done, as is the ridiculously lavish catering supplies, and there's some very nice little touches, such as her the awestruck silence when she enters a motorway eatery, or her stopping to remove her father’s battered old coat from a scarecrow on the property. Monitoring Diana’s every move with hawk eyes and a permanent scowl is Major Alistair Gregory (Timothy Spall, excellent as always), balanced by beloved personal attendant Maggie (Sally Hawkins, also very good), whilst Jack Farthing's Charles and Stella Gonet's Queen Elizabeth remain predictably (and convincingly) inscrutable and silent except for a few, all-too brief encounters.

There's a fair few weaknesses - some of the symbolism is laid on with a seriously heavy trowel, and some of the motifs are rather clumsy, notably an attempt to shoehorn Anne Boleyn into the action, whilst an extended dreamy montage involving a re-visit to her childhood home doesn't quite work. But mostly it's a compelling piece because of Stewart, who plays Diana as a messy, free-spirited outlier in an environment of suffocating order whilst also revealing that beneath the rebellion is lacerating trauma, which manifests in her bulimia, self-harm, paranoia and a resistance that lurches between crippling fear and contempt. Meanwhile, 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, sadly, all-too believable.