WARNING: SPOILERS

I like the title. I like that at the end she takes her two boys from the Queen’s Sandringham estate, where she’d felt so, so trapped, and to a KFC drive-thru, and when they ask for the name on the order, she pauses and says “Spencer,” underlining her newfound independence. Her marriage may be in ruins, her family estate may be in ruins, but Spencer lives. 

And yet ...

OK, so she objects to little William learning pheasant hunting, as Charles did as a child, as all the royal men have to do, and she shows up in the line of fire to stop the shooting and grab the kids. And then she takes them to KFC? For chicken? I assumed she objected to the pheasant hunting for the pheasants. The immorality of the kill. So what’s the message? Don’t kill birds, just eat dead birds? Mixed, at best.

Cries and whispers
Most of the rest of the movie is a slog. It’s basically Diana (Kristen Stewart) having a breakdown during Christmas 1991 over allegations of Charles’ affair with Camilla Parker Bowles. In the huge, cold rooms and hallways of the estate, she’s uncommunicative, whispery and desperate. The royals are uncommunicative and cold. They’re worried about her well-being but don’t say so. They send servants, so she feels overwatched, imprisoned. They’re worried about the press so they have her curtains sewn shut. Diana has her favorite royal dresser, Maggie (Sally Hawkins), but suddenly she’s gone, replaced by a sterner, colder model. A book about Anne Boleyn—a queen beheaded to make room for another—is left on her bed. She begins to hallucinate about Anne Boleyn. She sees herself as Anne Boleyn.

Director Pablo Larraín has done this kind of thing before. But his 2016 film, “Jackie,” worked, at least for me, because we had sympathy for the lead. We understood her trauma. One moment she’s the glamorous First Lady of the United States and the next she’s a widow with her husband’s blood and viscera in her hair and staining her clothes, and over several days she has to fight many, many men to get the funeral and the burial site she wants—all while suffering from a very understandable PTSD. Diana? No offense but the Camilla affair ain’t exactly the JFK assassination. Enjoy the palace, girl. Enjoy the soup. Put the pearls away. Buck up a little.

Or say something. And not just in a whisper. C’mon, Pablo, give us a scene. Give us drama rather than the throes of melodrama.

In the second half we do get a few conversations, mostly with the servants. Major Gregory (Timothy Spall) talks up duty, giving one’s life for country and Queen, but Diana doesn’t want people to die for her. She has a nice sitdown with the royal chef, Darren McGrady (Sean Harris, whom I mostly know from the 2009 “Red Riding” series). I don’t even remember what they talk about, but at least it’s something. Maggie returns, they go to the shore, and Maggie confesses her love for Diana. That’s a sweet scene. Then it’s pheasants, “All I Need is a Miracle,” and KFC. 

Pearl clutching
The aforementioned pearl necklace is a present from Charles, but Diana discovers he gave the same to Camilla. So at different times she imagines breaking the necklace at the dinner table and slurping one pearl up with her pea soup; or tearing it off at the head of the stairs of the decrepit Spencer house and watching the pearls spill down the staircase. The first didn’t happen. Did the second? Anne Boleyn is there with her. She prevents her from throwing herself down the staircase. Is Anne a figment and the breaking of the pearls not? Does it not matter since both are indicative of her frame of mind? She stops the suicide and breaks free from Charles. What’s suffocating her isn’t life but them.

The casting of the royals isn't as good as in, say, “The Crown.” No one really looks like their counterparts. Stewart, whom I’ve always liked, who’s the only American ever to win the César for acting, is fine here. At moments, I’m reminded of Diana. And she does seem to be losing it. But people losing it rarely makes for good cinema—particularly when we’re stuck inside their point-of-view. She's one of the most beloved women in the world and ... all this angst and drama? I guess I should've cared more for her. I didn't. To be honest, I wound up kind of siding with the royals. Not, I assume, what the movie intended.