The movie plays out over three days—Christmas Eve though Boxing Day 1991—and if you wanted to distill the plot to its essence, it’s an exploration of Diana’s breaking point, in which she decided to leave her husband and the life of a royal behind her. But it takes such a fascinatingly weird path from its beginning to that point that you can’t simply write the film off as just that. It’s a character study that’s more interested in truth than fact, and although I’m far from qualified to assess whether it hits that mark—really, only one person could have—it certainly feels convincing as a rather abstract expression of Diana’s inner life. 

I guess what I’m saying is, don’t bother Googling “Did that really happen?!” when you stumble on details that seem just farfetched enough to be true. It almost certainly didn’t happen. And trust me, you’ll reach a point in the film where the urge to fact-check leaves you entirely. Maybe it’s the scene in which Diana—played by Kristen Stewart—bites into and swallows a gigantic pearl from a necklace she ripped off her neck at the Christmas dinner table. Maybe it’s the scene in which she gains insight from the ghost of Anne Boleyn. But at some point you’ll give up trying to make more than a tenuous connection between this film and reality—except, perhaps, for the reality that existed in Lady Di’s head. 

Draw a line from Rosemary’s Baby to The Crown, however wiggly, and this film would hew closer to the former than the latter. It is, at times, a psychological drama, at times an absurdist fantasy, and at times a beat poem in cinematic form. And in keeping with its idiosyncratic nature, it doesn’t look like any film I’ve ever seen. There’s no denying from the very first frame that it was shot on film. The quality of the halation is apparent, and inimitable, despite the best video processing algorithms. It’s also a very muted film, mostly devoid of strong contrasts and lacking anything resembling true black. 

It wasn’t until I finished watching the movie and went digging for some additional insights that I discovered it was largely shot on 16mm, which I wouldn’t have guessed based on Vudu’s 4K HDR10 presentation. There doesn’t seem to be enough film grain here for it to have been shot on 16mm, at least not at first glance. And the image is devoid of the sort of muckery normally involved in noise reduction. Fine textures and organic chaos abound, but subtly. As it turns out, the filmmakers used Kodak Vision3 50D, 250D, and 500T stock, which is known for minimal grain even in low-light conditions, of which there are quite a bit in Spencer‘s 117-minute runtime. 

To cut straight to the chase, Spencer is a cinephile’s dream and a videophile’s nightmare. It has a soft, dreamlike, spooky quality but—as a result of the super-low contrasts—no sharp edges and absolutely no pop. It looks like an incredibly well-preserved photograph from decades past. And Vudu’s stream presents this enigmatic image almost flawlessly. There’s one scene early on that takes place in a bathroom in which contrasts are even lower than the norm for the rest of the film, and with the flatness of the background and the bleaching of Stewart’s skin tones, there’s a miniscule amount of posterization that might have been avoided with a bit more bandwidth than Vudu is capable of. But that’s it. 

And if you’ve been keeping up, you won’t be shocked to learn that the film’s Dolby Digital+ 5.1 soundtrack veers quite a way off the beaten path as well. A lot of that has to do with the score by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead fame, which runs the gamut from traditional cinematic composition to avant-garde jazz in spots, but never fails to both support and enhance the film’s erratic moods. 

Overall, it’s an incredibly dynamic mix, but perhaps not in the sense in which we normally use that word to describe surround mixes. It shifts on a whim from a whisper-quite monophonic experience to a shockingly immersive multichannel onslaught and back with something that might be described as regularity if there were anything regular about it. 

Overall, the music and sound mixing were by far my favorite things about Spencer, which is saying a lot given that I was captivated from beginning to end. It isn’t exactly a great film. Not quite. But it is a very good one, marred only by the occasional slip into melodrama, a few editing flubs, and an ending that’s too much of a tonal shift to swallow. For a movie that’s built on tension, tone, and shockingly tasteful body horror (seriously, who even knew that was possible?) to end with a singalong of Mike + The Mechanics’ “All I Need is a Miracle” over a bite of KFC was just a stretch too far for me. But don’t let that turn you off. Spencer is absolutely worth your time. Maybe rent it instead of buying it sight unseen, though.