10 Recent Movie Scenes Everyone Misunderstood
9. Diana Didn't Really Eat Pearls - Spencer
It's fair to say that audiences generally expect biopics to be rooted in a majority of truth, though as most of us know it's extremely common for Hollywood to embellish what really happened for dramatic purposes.
Yet Pablo Larraín's recent Princess Diana biopic Spencer unfolded as a far more surreal, dreamlike, even nightmarish piece of work, attempting to get viewers into Diana's (Kristen Stewart) fractured, anxiety-riddled mindset through an array of increasingly unsettling sequences.
By far the most memorable moment in the film occurs at a Christmas Eve dinner, where Diana destroys the pearl necklace given to her by husband Charles (Jack Farthing) and then eats the pearls in her pea soup.
Because Spencer was marketed as a more conventional, straight-forward biopic, many audience members evidently took the scene at absolute face value and assumed it was actually based on a real-life incident.
Yet this was entirely fabricated for the purposes of the film, intended to symbolise both Diana's increasing feelings of suffocation at having to abide by, even "swallow down" Royal traditions, and more literally the eating disorder she suffered with throughout her life.
But because the trailers rather sneakily painted Spencer as a typical biopic rather than an experimental mood piece, more casual-skewing audiences went home thinking that Diana did indeed gulp down some pearls in her soup.