Why are we endlessly fascinated with Princess Di? Here’s what ‘Spencer’ gets right and wrong

More than 23 years after her death, Princess Diana is newly ubiquitous in pop culture. Now we’ve got “Spencer,” a biopic following the former Lady Diana Spencer as she unravels over the course of a particularly miserable Christmas holiday at Sandringham, the queen’s Norfolk estate, in 1991. “Spencer” is a surreal, psychologically astute portrait that offers remarkable insight into Diana’s many contradictions — “a fable from a true tragedy,” according to the opening title card, rather than a feature-length Wikipedia entry. Dressing a princess: Kristen Stewart and Laura Benson in “Spencer.” Larraín seizes on some of the more ludicrous royal family customs — like the military convoy that brings all their food to the estate, or the supposedly “fun” tradition of weighing everyone in the family to make sure they’ve indulged themselves thoroughly over the holiday, an obvious trigger for the bulimic Diana — but never gets bogged down in tedious exposition. Here I thought it was “Rosemary’s Baby” meets “Downton Abbey,” while it’s actually just a nightmarish version of “The Family Stone.” “Spencer” is no hagiography, but I think it is ultimately quite sympathetic to Diana.