Spencer Suite

Jonny Greenwood scored Pablo Larraín's portrait of Diana Spencer at Sandringham during a catastrophic Christmas weekend with music that functions as the film's interior monologue — what the princess cannot say aloud, rendered in chamber strings. The suite is built primarily on sustained dissonances that never quite resolve, creating a persistent low-level dread beneath surface beauty. Greenwood draws on twentieth-century European modernism — Shostakovich's string quartets, Penderecki's textural extremes — rather than the lush orchestral romanticism that period-set British films typically deploy. This is deliberate: the score refuses the comfort of the aesthetic conventions associated with the setting. There are moments of aching melodic clarity that arrive like breaks in cloud cover, only to be reabsorbed into the tension. The suite captures something essential about the film's subject — the experience of being simultaneously the most visible and most trapped person in a room — through textural means rather than narrative ones. Greenwood's background as Radiohead's guitarist and principal composer shapes his orchestral thinking: he approaches acoustic instruments with the same curiosity about extremity and discomfort that characterizes rock writing. The result is chamber music that doesn't play by the rules of chamber music, beautiful and deliberately, purposefully uncomfortable.