Spencer (2021)

The film is a portrait of a woman in an elegant prison. Larraín shoots Sandringham as an institution that consumes its women, all corridors and cold silver and prescribed hours. Diana's rebellion is feminist in register: autonomy, identity, the refusal to be a decorative asset in someone else's pageant. Kristen Stewart carries it with nervous hands and clipped vowels, and the camera rarely leaves her. The picture's central engine is a woman dismantling a patriarchal apparatus, and it runs on mood and hallucination instead of speeches.

The film's progressive content is modest and mostly atmospheric. Maggie, the royal dresser, confesses her love for Diana on a beach, a fleeting same-sex note that registers and then departs. The critique of the monarchy's wealth and emotional sterility is present but stops short of any argument about economic systems. This is a critique of a family, not of capital. There is no sermonizing either; the film trusts imagery over messaging, and the imagery is potent. Pearls eaten in soup. A scarecrow wearing a dead man's coat. A wire cutter held against a wrist.

What the film declines to do is equally clear. It engages no racial consciousness, no climate anxiety, no inclusive casting (the Windsors remain as pale as history left them), no body positivity (there is body horror and disordered eating here, a different category entirely), and no neurodivergence as a concept. Mental anguish arrives as haunting, not as diagnosis. Historical revisionism is not on the agenda. This is a fictionalized interior life, not a re-litigation of the record. A somber, well-tailored chamber piece whose politics are personal, gendered, and quiet. We file it accordingly.