"Spencer": The Royal Horror Movie You Didn't Know You Needed

Hi everyone,

I watched "Spencer" (2021) and I'm excited to write about it.

Going in, I didn't have very clear expectations for this film.  I was intrigued to see Kristen Stewart's transformation into Princess Diana and the trailer looked moody and beautiful, and because I'm all out of episodes of "The Crown" and my favorite fact-checking podcast on maligned women, I was very much game to check out this movie.  To my delight and surprise, it quickly became very clear that the film borrowed extensively aesthetically, thematically, and structurally from Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (1980).  

The aesthetic similarities struck me first: gauzy lighting and drab pastel palette, occasionally and jarringly disturbed by lurid splashes of red in the plaid of a jacket or the berry gelée topping a set of unnaturally perfect desserts in a massive walk-in refrigerator and inevitably evoking bloodshed and harkening back to The Overlook’s elevators, not to mention the legacy of a colonizing monarchy.  

Looking back, the structural similarities are also impossible to miss.  The film opens, like “The Shining”, on the ominous and lengthy trek into the distant location that hosts the majority of its action.  Also similar to “The Shining”, “Spencer” is set primarily in a remote, cavernous, unnecessarily and purposefully cold, expensive yet austere, and almost certainly haunted estate—groaning under centuries of weighty, sometimes terrifying, history—with grounds so vast they could swallow you whole yet not vast enough that you aren’t always, always being watched, either by ill-intentioned spying royal staff or by the place itself.  

Throw in the thematic elements of a main character’s escalating hallucinatory insanity as a direct consequence of brutal, violent, and all-encompassing isolation from the outside world, and you’ve got yourself quite the homage to a giant of horror films.

All of this is to deeply satisfying effect for those of us who love the old horror classic.  It is a mashup I didn’t expect or know I wanted, and yet it is very easily half the reason I like “Spencer”.

A stark counterpoint to the terror constantly nipping at Diana’s heels and the other half of the reason I liked this film is Diana’s moments with her sons.  Here, you see her grounded even as she’s unmoored.  She is playful, creative, vulnerable yet brave, and in deep, fierce maternal love with her boys.  They are her only true oasis in the vast desert of deprivation and cruelty that is her life as a member of the House of Windsor.

It is this love that brings the film to its conclusion, where just like in “The Shining”, the besieged mother faces down the monsters that would destroy her and flees to the safety of reality with her sons.  

And here is a place where “Spencer” crucially breaks with the horror film it references: when Diana interrupts the royal family’s bird hunt in a bid to spare her children from taking part in the bloodshed, instead of seeking to trap Diana and the boys there on the royal estate with him forevermore Charles sends the boys to their mother’s side.  This moment is heartbreaking as it is also exhilarating, as we see in Charles’s granting permission for the boys to go with Diana that he is granting his wife the right to protect her children that his own mother never exercised for his sake and the freedom to flee that he has been denied.  

While the villain of “Spencer” isn’t as honest or blunt as to wield an axe or risk freezing to death pursuing her, the royal family Diana leaves behind is nevertheless frozen in time, doomed to emptily repeat meaningless rituals like well-dressed automatons and eternally kept apart from the real world.  And unlike in “The Shining”, where the mother and child survive, we know that Diana was ultimately not so lucky.  But at least for a blissful moment of fantasy, we see her soothed by the everyday banality of fast food fried chicken and a tourist’s view of London.

While the film isn't perfect, it really is great--especially for fans of unexpected and component allusions to horror classics.  I gave this movie a 4.

{Heart}