“I want to masturbate.”

The way this fanfic decides to go for shock value every five minutes would be laudable in any other circumstance. The problem is that one presupposes fanfic has to at least have some degree of acknowledgement/respect for its subject, and the only thing they allow to Diana here is to be a devoted mother.

Elsewhere, Knight and Larraín don’t even consider her a woman, a human, nothing, just some whacko — why, I don’t know. I started to wonder whether this could be some sort of self-aware exercise, but then, nope. It’s like they picked every salacious element of this deceased person’s life, and tried to cram it all in a three-day-span narrative.

The script is abysmal in ways few writers could ever conceive; the way it relies on exposition for everything the Princess might be feeling is almost as offensive as the misery it puts her through. Should’ve also come with a trigger warning for people who’ve suffered from eating disorders; it forced me 15 minutes in to calculate the calories I’d taken in during the day and the ones that I’d have at dinner, that’s the level of bad that was.

I can be Kristen Stewart’s staunchest defender in any given day, but I feel like her acting here is indefensible, feel free to unfollow. Eddie Redmayne levels of performative, but that might also be Larraín’s fault, I don’t know. The fact is that it looks like she decided to study Lady Di’s demeanor in, like, three famous interviews, and built the performance from there. The overdramatic mannerisms, the stiff shoulders, her neck going back and forth around the clock, always with glacial eyes; it’s all a caricature. I don’t believe anyone involved in this creative process ever pondered “she probably wasn’t that shy when she didn’t have 50 cameras pointed at her, probably”.

By the time Larraín drops All I Need Is A Miracle, it’s already too late to save face, even though it provides the ending some dignity. Sally Hawkins tries her magic insistently, but she too can only do so much. Still, after Hirschbiegel’s Diana and that Netflix live musical thing, it feels like this popular icon’s fourth time passing already.

Maybe letting the woman finally rest in peace wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Maybe.

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