Spencer (12A)
✪✪✪✪
Halloween may be over, but there’s an artfully ghoulish quality to Spencer, Chilean auteur Pablo Larraín’s audacious new film about about Princess Diana’s final Christmas as part of the royal family. Starring Kristen Stewart in the lead, the film isn’t ghoulish in its treatment of its protagonist, but Larraín (who made the similarly inventive Jackie) and British screenwriter Steven Knight (Eastern Promises, Locke), do take a gleefully macabre approach to the monarchy. Riffing on the The Shining with ominous aerial shots of Sandringham, the film’s setting is presented as a gilded-cage version of the Overlook Hotel, one replete with a sinister Timothy Spall as an all-seeing equerry intent on correcting Diana, and Diana’s own fracturing psyche bringing forth the ghost of Anne Boleyn in a place where “the past and the present are the same thing" and the “future doesn’t exist.” Opening with a military-style operation to get Sandringham ready for the holidays, the film subtly sets up the notion that Christmas with the in-laws is going to be a battleground for Diana, with her subsequent late arrival signifying the extent to which she’s already in a kind of monarchical no-man’s land, caught between her desire to desert and her determination to fight for her children.
As such, what follows shouldn’t be viewed as a dramatically realistic portrait of the inner workings of the royal family, but an expressionistic horror film. Through it all, Stewart is fearless as Diana. Complimented by the eerie madness of Jonny Greenwood’s disorientating score, her performance eschews reverential mimicry in favour of a more empathetic and interpretive exploration of Diana’s internal chaos. General release
Eternals
(12A)
The Eternals has been conceived as one of the launchpads for the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic
Universe, but is more notable for how completely it subsumes director Chloé Zhao’s hitherto distinctive filmmaking style. Based on a gibberish Jack Kirby comic about a race of interstellar superbeings who’ve been hiding out on Earth for the last 7,000 years protecting its citizens from a race of lupine supervillains known as Deviants, the film jumps back and forth across centuries to lay out a deeply uninteresting origins story involving a celestial god and another civilisation-threatening plan for global annihilation. Among the extensive cast, Angelina Jolie, Richard Madden, Gemma Chan and Salma Hayek come across as charisma vacuums, with only Kumail Nanjiani and Barry Keoghan bringing any sense of fun to an overly earnest universe that’s short on zippy banter and big on shoddily rendered CGI setpieces.