Spencer

Directed by Pablo Larraín, Spencer follows Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart) as she spends an aggressively uneventful holiday weekend with her royal in-laws. Filmmaker Larraín, working from Steven Knight’s often astonishingly meandering screenplay, delivers a mostly endless drama that contains exceedingly little in the way of context or character development, as the movie instead emphasizes its protagonist’s decidedly less-than-engrossing exploits in and around an enormous estate – with Stewart’s paper-thin figure, for example, wandering the expansive grounds and playing games with her small children. It’s clear, then, that Spencer‘s exceedingly few positive attributes, including Claire Mathon’s mostly captivating cinematography, are slowly-but-surely rendered moot by the pervasively interminable atmosphere, and there’s little doubt, as well, that the arms-length vibe is perpetuated (and heightened) by Stewart’s decent-enough yet far-from-immersive turn as the iconic title character. (It doesn’t help, either, that Larraín has seemingly directed Stewart and her various costars to deliver most of their dialogue in incomprehensible whispers.) The decision to continually stress the most mundane of happenings, unsurprisingly, paves the way for a monotonous, hopelessly inconsequential second half that peaks with a laughably anticlimactic finale, which ensures, ultimately, that it’s impossible not to wonder what Larraín was hoping to accomplish with this unfocused and thoroughly misbegotten mess (ie what is the point of this, really?)

* out of ****