Mike H.’s review published on Letterboxd:
Can we just let her be now?
Between The Crown, that god-awful musical on Apple TV, and now this, Princess Di has been poked and prodded, explored and dissected all over again.
It's not Kristen Stewart's fault, but her twitchy, overly mannered performance doesn't reveal anything new about Diana, it just plays into the bell jar that Pablo Larraín constructs for her narrative. I realize it's shot like a horror movie because her life was a horror movie. But the film lacks context, and forces Stewart to sell her breakdown in a vacuum. Maybe it assumes we already know the stakes, but that still requires us to have dug into her personal life with a pick-axe many times before.
Even in a film where she's the sympathetic victim, we're still turning her inside out and thrusting on her our assumptions and evaluations, all in public, all in the limelight she hated. And I'm not innocent, as I saw the movie and am now writing a review about it.
So maybe, just maybe, the best way for us to honor Diana Spencer is to finally just leave her the fuck alone.
