Spencer: Kristen Stewart for Lady Diana’s latest fairy tale

These days I had a chance to preview The Crown 6, the final season of the popular Netflix TV Show about which we will be able to tell you only when the embargo expires (embargo expired, here is the review of The Crown 6). However, the first minutes of the very episode evoked the iconic images created by Chilean director Pablo Larrain with one of his last feature films, Spencer starring Kristen Stewart.

After the tragic Natalie Portman’s Jacqueline Kennedy in Jackie and the dazzling, fluid and imaginative Mariana di Girolamo’s Ema, via the recent fictional, televised and supernatural interlude of the Julianne Moore’s Lisey from Lisey’s Story, TV show Apple TV+ based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King (here Apple TV+ Best TV Shows), Pablo Larrain’s cinema looked to the birth spirits of Dickensian memory to tell the iconic Lady Diana, announced here from the title with his original identity as Spencer, a surname proudly put on display by the work and which also immediately becomes a kind of vindication in the face of a crown that has never been so oppressive.

And oppression is the overarching theme of this highly original and allegorical biopic that would have anticipated the allegories of the recent El Conde (here is our review of El Conde), another mock biopic by Larrain that imagines dictator Augusto Pinochet as a two-hundred-year-old vampire. Rather than historical veracity, Spencer looks to horror cinema and the forms of the Polanskian thriller, amid dreaminess and suggestions of a melancholy and suffocating gloom.

These are the stakes, walls, fences and fences within which the Chilean author sets up the eerie and wonderful representation of a dark fairy tale in which the happy ending for the princess locked up in the castle is only an illusion: a surreal and sweet appetizer in anticipation of the final episodes of The Crown 6, which will arrive on Netflix in two ‘Volumes’ from November 16 and December 14.