Does Kristen Stewart’s Spencer already look familiar? Blame The Crown

Whoever gets hired to do the trailers for Netflix’s The Crown, and whoever did the one that just dropped for Spencer, Kristen Stewart’s forthcoming Diana biopic, could learn absolutely nothing from each other. Their styles are certainly of a piece: we get mist-sheathed Sandringham, dancing in empty ballrooms, slowed-down pop balladry laced with an ironic melancholy.

Frissons of ceremony set the scene. Here’s a swirl of crème fraiche unspooling in the royal kitchens, topping off what looks like asparagus velouté. Beneath the pomp, there’s always the pain. Whether it’s Emma Corrin’s Diana collapsing to the floor, or Stewart’s hiding in a bathroom to avoid the Christmas festivities, we’re promised privileged behind-the-scenes access to the royals’ broken psyches. The production values flaunted along the way are but a gilded cage in which we’ll get to watch them squirm.

Spencer arrives, whether opportunistically or not, between Seasons 4 and 5 of The Crown, and is set during that same period of the princess’s life. On paper, it could practically scan as a feature-length spinoff – a standalone Diana special before Elizabeth Debicki picks up the character next season and finishes the job. That’s an impression you might be forgiven for getting from this trailer, even if it’s obviously not correct. Trailers exist to mislead us, mere front covers for the book to follow.

Spencer’s screenwriter, Peaky Blinders’ Steven Knight, says he’s never watched a single episode of The Crown, as he didn’t want to be influenced by it. There is also no way that Pablo Larraín, the film’s feted Chilean director, is interested in plugging a gap between seasons or emulating The Crown’s dramatic sensibility in any respect. If he’s accidentally done that, he has failed in what he wants his film to be.

I’m hopeful he hasn’t. Larraín has said he doesn’t even regard Spencer as a biopic; the same was true of his Jackie (2016), with Natalie Portman as a shellshocked Jackie Kennedy, and the same year’s fascinating Neruda, with Luis Gnecco as the fugitive Chilean poet. He describes this loose trilogy instead as “movies about people in certain circumstances where everything is about to explode. They’re not really biographical analyzations; it’s not the study of a life of someone. I think some people could misunderstand.”

We could blame the trailer for not exactly clarifying his intent, but I’m more inclined to blame The Crown for hogging the entire conversation around the royals and forcing it in a particular direction. The series hasn’t rendered it impossible to attempt any other kind of depiction – after all, Spencer did get made. But it’s going to be tough for Larraín to avoid these Crown comparisons, however otiose they might wind up being.

Kristen Stewart’s performance could well be wonderful, and it’ll still be weighed everywhere against Corrin’s – from what I can tell, the most critically well-received aspect of The Crown’s last season. Even those impressed by the former’s work will be at pains to insist that K-Stew shows “another side” of Diana or differentiates her portrait in some vital way from Corrin’s. This isn’t an especially productive line of critique, only because it’s a predictable tactic, forced upon us by having to make the comparison in the first place. So I blame The Crown, again, for existing.

Spencer can do two things, hopefully, that The Crown doesn’t. It can work as a study in one person’s alienation. Plus, if Larraín’s on the same wavelength he was in No (2012), The Club (2015) and Ema (2019), as well as Jackie and Neruda, it can mesmerise as cinema. The Crown is never that.

As has been said many times, it’s fundamentally high-class soap, constricted by the dozens of characters it has to track along the way. The vast majority of its scenes are one-on-one conversations pushing the saga forward, needing to hit crucial dramatic beats and letting those many actors advance the arcs they’ve been prescribed.

I doubt Stewart will have much of an “arc” to speak of in Spencer, and personally, I’m grateful. Since it’s all set over one weekend, I’m imagining her Diana will be illustrated in a fairly fixed state of crisis, which Larraín’s style will want to prolong as glacially as possible. Avid Crown fans may baulk at the concept of a slowed-down, dialogue-averse, dramatically stifled, self-consciously artisanal two-hour Doomed Diana interlude that’s nothing to do with The Crown in any way. But I genuinely can’t wait.