Now Streaming: The Princess

At the outset of The Princess, streaming now on HBO, we meet Diana Spencer as the world did in 1980 - a fresh-faced nineteen-year-old plucked from relative obscurity and thrust into global fame by a relentless media fixated on her every move.

The all-archival documentary is both immersive and harrowing, propelled by director Ed Perkins’s trenchant selection and deployment of archival materials, as well as a taut score by Martin Phipps. Though we know too well how the story ends, we watch it unfold with something like dread as Princess Diana is brought into the confines of the Royal Family and then left to fend for herself against the paparazzi’s insatiable appetite for details and images of her private life.

But a more complex portrait of Diana emerges in The Princess. There is a striking contrast between her tone and body language in early interviews, especially those where Charles is present, and the more candid images of her at work as she grew into her public role. In the former, she is numb and something is clearly amiss. In the latter, she comes alive and becomes the woman so many grew to love. And it is the latter self that would prevail as she severed ties with Charles and the Royal Family and struck out on her own.