Pablo Larraín: The Life Story Behind the Chilean Director

Pablo Larraín is the Chilean director who made the world look at Chile in a new way. His films are quiet, strange, and brave. They do not shout. They watch people who are trapped by history, by power, or by their own fame, and they show what that pressure does to a human being. From No, the film about the campaign that helped end a dictatorship, to Jackie, Spencer, and Maria, his portraits of famous women under the weight of the world’s gaze, Larraín has built one of the most respected careers in world cinema without ever leaving his Chilean roots behind.

He was born in Santiago in 1976, into a family that lived close to politics. His father, Hernán Larraín, was a well-known Chilean politician, and the world of public life, speeches, and power was part of the air Pablo breathed as a boy. But he did not follow his father into politics. He was drawn to images, to stories, and to the strange space between what people say in public and what they feel in private. That space became the heart of his films.

What makes Larraín different from many directors is that he began in advertising and music videos, learning how to tell a story in thirty seconds, and then carried that sharpness into feature films about the darkest chapters of Chilean history. He did not make his films to please everyone. He made them because Chile’s past would not leave him alone, and because he believed cinema could ask questions that politics could not answer.

Growing Up in Santiago in a Political Family

Pablo Larraín was born on 19 August 1976 in Santiago, the capital of Chile. He grew up in the years when Chile was ruled by the military government of Augusto Pinochet, and the country around him was full of fear, silence, and things that could not be said out loud. His family was part of the political world. His father was a politician on the right of Chilean politics, and the dinner table in the Larraín home was a place where the country’s future was argued about. For a boy who would become a filmmaker, this was a strange and powerful education. He learned early that history is not something in books. It is something that lives in families, in arguments, and in the things people refuse to say.

Santiago in those years was a city of contrasts. There were grand houses and poor neighbourhoods, modern buildings and old streets, and the Andes mountains standing over everything like a wall. The city gave Larraín his sense of place. His later films are full of rooms that feel too big or too empty, of streets where people walk alone, and of a country that looks beautiful and broken at the same time. He did not need to invent that feeling. He had grown up inside it.

As a young man, Larraín studied audiovisual communication, and he went to work in advertising. This may seem like a surprising start for a director of serious films, but it taught him lessons he never forgot. In advertising, every second counts. You must catch the eye, tell a story, and leave a feeling, all in a very short time. Larraín learned to think in images, to trust the camera more than words, and to understand how a picture can change what people feel. He also directed music videos, which gave him freedom to try strange ideas, to play with colour and rhythm, and to learn how music and image can work together.

His family name opened doors, but it also brought questions. Some people wondered whether a man from a wealthy, political family could make honest films about Chile. Larraín answered that question with his work. His films did not flatter his family or his class. They looked at power with a cold eye, and they gave a voice to people who had been ignored or crushed. He chose to tell stories about the dictatorship, about ordinary people caught in terrible times, and about the way the past keeps returning. That choice took courage, because in Chile those stories were still painful, and many people preferred not to look back.

The young Larraín also founded a production company, Fábula, with his brother Juan de Dios Larraín. Fábula would become one of the most important film companies in Chile, producing not only Larraín’s own films but also the work of other Chilean directors. This was a sign of something that would define his whole career. He did not only want to make his own films. He wanted to build a place where Chilean cinema could grow, where young directors could find support, and where stories from Chile could reach the world. Fábula became that place, and it remains central to his life.

Fuga and the First Steps Into Feature Films

Larraín’s first feature film was Fuga, released in 2006. It was a dark and unusual film about a musician whose mind is falling apart, and it showed the world that a new Chilean director had arrived with a voice of his own. The film was not a simple story. It moved between reality and imagination, between music and madness, and it asked the audience to work hard. Some viewers found it difficult, but critics noticed the confidence of the direction, the careful images, and the willingness to take risks.

Fuga was important because it set the pattern for everything that followed. Larraín was not interested in making easy films that everyone would enjoy on a Friday night. He was interested in difficult people, in broken minds, and in the way the past haunts the present. The musician in Fuga cannot escape the music in his head, just as Chile could not escape the history in its streets. That idea, that the past is never really past, would return in film after film.

The film also showed Larraín’s taste for working with the same actors again and again. He began to build a company of performers he trusted, people who understood his quiet, careful way of working. The Chilean actor Alfredo Castro, who would become one of his most important collaborators, was part of that world. Larraín learned that a director does not work alone. A film is made by a group of people who trust each other, and that trust is built over years, film after film.

Fuga did not make Larraín famous around the world, but it made him known in Chile and in the festival world. It was shown at film festivals, it was talked about by critics, and it gave him the confidence to go further. He had proved to himself that he could make a feature film, that he could hold a strange story together, and that audiences and critics would take him seriously. The next step was to tell a story that was even closer to the bone, a story about Chile itself.

In those early years, Larraín was also learning how to run a production company while making films. Fábula was growing, and it was taking on television work, advertising, and other directors’ films. This was hard, tiring work, but it gave Larraín a practical education in how films are financed, how crews are organised, and how a small country’s cinema can survive. He was not a director who sat in a room and waited for money to arrive. He built the machine that made his films possible, and that machine helped many other Chilean filmmakers too.

Tony Manero and Post Mortem: Looking at the Dictatorship

Larraín’s second film, Tony Manero, released in 2008, was a shock to many viewers. It told the story of a man in Santiago in the late 1970s who is obsessed with the film Saturday Night Fever and with the character Tony Manero, played by John Travolta. The man, played by Alfredo Castro, spends his days dancing, dreaming of fame, and trying to win a television dance contest. But underneath the dancing there is something dark. He is violent, selfish, and capable of terrible things, and the film does not look away from that.

Tony Manero was set during the Pinochet dictatorship, but it was not a film about generals and soldiers. It was a film about an ordinary man who had absorbed the violence of his time and made it his own. Larraín was saying something brave and uncomfortable: that a dictatorship does not only live in government buildings. It lives in ordinary people, in the way they treat each other, in the dreams they chase, and in the cruelty they learn to accept. The film was praised at festivals around the world, and it won awards, including recognition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Two years later, Larraín released Post Mortem, in 2010. The film was set in the days around the military coup of 1973, when Salvador Allende’s government was overthrown and Pinochet came to power. The main character, played again by Alfredo Castro, works in a morgue, typing up reports on the dead. He is a quiet, lonely man, and he becomes obsessed with a woman who lives near him. As the coup unfolds around him, bodies begin to arrive at the morgue, and the film shows the horror of those days through the eyes of a man who can barely speak.

Post Mortem was a difficult film to watch, and that was the point. Larraín did not make a film full of speeches about politics. He made a film about a man who types, who watches, who does his job while terrible things happen. The horror of the coup is shown in the small details: a body on a table, a report that must be typed, a street that is suddenly empty. Critics around the world praised the film for its courage and its originality. It was clear now that Larraín was not just a talented director. He was a director with something urgent to say about his country.

These two films also showed Larraín’s style taking shape. He liked long, still shots. He liked to let the camera watch a person for a long time without cutting away. He liked muted colours, grey skies, and rooms that felt cold. He did not use music to tell the audience how to feel. He trusted the audience to feel it for themselves. This style was the opposite of the fast, loud films that filled cinemas at the time, and it made his work stand out. People who saw a Larraín film did not forget it.

No and the Film That Travelled the World

In 2012, Larraín made the film that changed his life. No was based on a true story, the story of the 1988 referendum in Chile, when the people were asked to vote yes or no on whether Pinochet should stay in power for another eight years. The campaign against Pinochet was run by a young advertising man, René Saavedra, played by the Mexican actor Gael García Bernal. Instead of making a serious, angry campaign about torture and murder, Saavedra made a cheerful campaign full of colour, music, and hope. He told Chileans that happiness was coming, and that they could vote no and change their country.

No was a brilliant film because it understood something deep about politics and about people. Fear alone does not change minds. Hope does. Larraín shot the film on old video cameras from the 1980s, so that the film looked like the television of that time. The colours were faded, the images were soft, and the whole film felt like a memory. This was not a trick. It was a way of putting the audience inside that moment, inside a country that was tired, frightened, and ready for something new.

The film was a great success. It was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won an award, and it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It was the first Chilean film ever to be nominated for an Oscar, and that fact alone made it a moment of national pride. People in Chile watched the film and saw their own history on screen, not as a lesson in a textbook but as a living, breathing story. People around the world watched it and understood something about Chile that they had never understood before.

No also changed what was possible for Larraín. He was no longer only a Chilean director. He was a world director. Studios and producers in the United States and Europe began to call him. Actors wanted to work with him. He could have moved to Hollywood and made big, safe films. Instead, he kept his Chilean company, kept his Chilean collaborators, and chose his next projects with care. He had proved that a film from a small country, about a small country’s history, could speak to the whole world.

The success of No also brought new attention to Chilean cinema. Young directors in Chile saw that it was possible to tell a Chilean story and be heard everywhere. Fábula grew stronger, and Chilean films began to appear at festivals around the world. Larraín had not set out to be a symbol of Chilean cinema, but he became one, and he carried that responsibility with seriousness. He never stopped making films about Chile, even as his career took him to London, to Paris, and to Hollywood.

The Club, Neruda, and the Move Into English

After No, Larraín made The Club, released in 2015. It was a dark and disturbing film about a group of disgraced Catholic priests who live together in a small house on the Chilean coast, sent there by the Church to live quietly and pray. A new priest arrives, and the fragile peace of the house falls apart. The film was about guilt, about the Church, and about a country that had learned to hide its sins in quiet places. It won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, one of the highest honours in European cinema.

The Club showed that Larraín was not afraid to take on powerful institutions. He had already made films about the dictatorship. Now he was making a film about the Catholic Church, which is one of the most powerful forces in Chilean life. He did it without shouting, without easy answers, and without villains who were simple to hate. The priests in the film are guilty men, but they are also human beings, frightened and lost. That refusal to make things simple is what makes Larraín’s films so powerful. He trusts the audience to think.

In 2016, Larraín made Neruda, a film about the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, played by Luis Gnecco. The film told the story of Neruda’s life as a fugitive in the late 1940s, when he was a senator and a communist, and the government ordered his arrest. He went into hiding, and a police inspector, played by Gael García Bernal, chased him across Chile. But the film was not a simple chase. It was a game between two men, a poet and a policeman, each of whom needed the other to give his life meaning.

Neruda was a beautiful film, full of poetry, colour, and strange, dreamlike scenes. It showed a different side of Larraín, a lighter and more playful side, but it was still about Chile, about politics, and about the power of words. Neruda the poet had used words to fight for what he believed in, and Larraín used images to do the same. The film was praised around the world, and it was chosen as Chile’s entry for the Academy Awards.

In the same year, 2016, Larraín made his first film in English, Jackie. It was about Jacqueline Kennedy in the days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, and it starred Natalie Portman in one of the great performances of her career. Jackie was not a film about politics. It was a film about grief, about a woman who had to bury her husband, protect her children, and protect her husband’s place in history, all while the whole world was watching her. Portman was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, and the film was praised for its intelligence, its beauty, and its refusal to be sentimental.

Jackie proved that Larraín could work in English, with American stars, on an American story, and still make a film that felt like his own. The long, still shots were there. The muted colours were there. The sense of a person trapped inside a public role was there. He had taken the lessons of his Chilean films and carried them into a new world, and the world had welcomed him.

Spencer, El Conde, and Maria: Portraits of Famous Women

After Jackie, Larraín began to build a group of films about famous women who were trapped by fame. In 2021, he made Spencer, about Princess Diana, played by Kristen Stewart. The film was set over a single Christmas weekend at the royal family’s country house, when Diana knew her marriage was over and she had to decide who she was. Stewart’s performance was widely praised, and she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. The film was not a biography in the usual sense. It did not tell Diana’s whole life. It told three days of her life, and through those three days it showed the whole weight of being a princess.

Spencer was a film about a woman who could not breathe. The house was cold, the rules were endless, the cameras were always waiting, and Diana’s only freedom was in her imagination, in her memories, and in her love for her sons. Larraín understood that feeling, because it was the same feeling he had explored in his Chilean films: a person trapped inside a system that is too big to fight. The difference was that now the system was the British royal family, and the whole world was watching.

In 2023, Larraín returned to Chile for El Conde, a strange and daring film that imagined Pinochet as a vampire who had lived for two hundred and fifty years and now wanted to die. The film was a black comedy, a horror film, and a political satire all at once. It was shot in black and white, and it was full of dark jokes about power, about money, and about a country that could not escape its past. Some people found it shocking. Others found it brilliant. Everyone agreed that it was a film only Larraín could have made. He had taken the darkest figure in Chilean history and turned him into a monster, which is what, in Larraín’s view, he had always been.

Then, in 2024, Larraín completed his trilogy of famous women with Maria, about the opera singer Maria Callas, played by Angelina Jolie. The film was set in Paris in the last week of Callas’s life, when she was old, lonely, and haunted by her voice, which had once been the most famous voice in the world. Jolie’s performance was praised, and the film was shown at the Venice Film Festival. Like Jackie and Spencer, Maria was not a film about a whole life. It was a film about the end of a life, about a woman looking back at what she had been and what she had lost.

These three films, Jackie, Spencer, and Maria, made Larraín one of the most talked-about directors in the world. They were beautiful, sad, and strange, and they showed that he could take the most famous women of the twentieth century and find something new and human in their stories. He did not make films about queens and stars. He made films about women who were lonely, who were watched, and who wanted to be free.

What Pablo Larraín Leaves Behind

Pablo Larraín’s legacy is still being written, because he is still working, still making films, and still surprising audiences. But already his place in cinema is clear. He is the director who took the history of Chile, one of the most painful histories in Latin America, and turned it into films that the whole world could understand. He did it without simplifying, without shouting, and without giving easy answers. He trusted his audience, and his audience trusted him back.

His company, Fábula, has become one of the most important forces in Chilean cinema. It has produced films, television series, and the work of many young directors. It has shown that a small country can have a strong cinema, and that a director can be both an artist and a builder. Larraín did not only make films. He made a home for films, and that home will outlast any single film he makes.

His style has also left a mark on world cinema. The long takes, the quiet rooms, the muted colours, the trust in the actor’s face: these are now part of the language of serious film. Young directors around the world watch his films and learn from them. They learn that a film does not need to be loud to be powerful, that a small moment can carry a whole history, and that a director’s job is not to tell the audience what to think but to give them something worth thinking about.

For Chile, Larraín’s work has a special meaning. His films are part of how Chile remembers itself. No reminded Chileans of the day they voted no and changed their country. Tony Manero and Post Mortem reminded them of the years they would rather forget. El Conde reminded them that the past is still alive, still hungry, and still dangerous. A country’s memory lives in its films, and Larraín’s films are now part of Chile’s memory.

He remains a private man, not given to big speeches or public drama. He works, he makes films, and he lets the films speak. That quietness is part of his strength. In a world where directors often talk more than they make, Larraín makes more than he talks. His films are his argument, his history, and his gift to the audience. And as long as people watch films, they will be watching Pablo Larraín.

My Take:

I have spent a long time thinking about Pablo Larraín, and the first thing I want to say is that he is the kind of director who makes me feel cleverer as a viewer, not smaller. He does not explain everything. He does not hold my hand and tell me what to feel. He puts a camera in a quiet room, lets a person sit there for a long time, and trusts me to understand what is happening inside that person. That trust is rare, and it is the reason I keep returning to his films even when they are difficult, even when they leave me unsettled, even when I do not fully understand them on the first watch.

What I admire most about Larraín is that he chose the hard road. He was born into a wealthy, political family in Chile. He could have made easy films. He could have made comedies, or love stories, or safe historical dramas that flattered his country. Instead, he made films about the dictatorship, about the coup, about priests who had done terrible things, about a country that was still hurting. That is not the easy road. In Chile, those subjects were painful. People had lost family members. People had been tortured. People had been forced to leave the country. To make films about those years was to open old wounds, and Larraín did it anyway, because he believed that a country that does not look at its past cannot understand its present.

I think about Tony Manero often, because it is a film that refuses to let me feel comfortable. The main character is a man who dances, who dreams of being like John Travolta, who wants to be loved and admired. And at the same time, he is a violent, selfish man who hurts people without thinking. Larraín does not excuse him. He does not explain him away by saying that the dictatorship made him that way. He shows me a man who has taken the violence of his time into his own body and made it part of himself. That is a frightening idea, and it is a true one. I have seen it in my own life, in small ways: the way people who grow up in angry homes sometimes become angry themselves, the way a society that is cruel teaches its children to be cruel. Larraín saw that truth and put it on screen without flinching, and I respect him deeply for that.

Post Mortem moves me in a different way. It is a film about a man who types reports on the dead while a coup happens around him. He is not a hero. He is not a villain. He is a small man doing a small job, and the horror of history passes through his hands in the form of bodies on tables. I think that is one of the most honest things ever said about how terrible events actually happen. They do not only happen in palaces and in battles. They happen in offices, in morgues, in ordinary rooms where ordinary people do their jobs and try not to think too hard about what they are seeing. Larraín understands that, and he makes me understand it too. After watching Post Mortem, I cannot think about history in the same way. I think about the typists, the drivers, the clerks, the people who kept the machine running, and I ask myself what I would have done in their place.

No is the film of his that I love most, and I think it is the film that will last longest. It is about a campaign, about advertising, about a young man who decides that hope is a better weapon than anger. I love that idea, because it is true in my own life as well. When I am angry, I shout, and people stop listening. When I offer hope, when I show people something better, they listen. The young advertising man in No understood that, and he used it to help change his country. Larraín shot the film on old video cameras so that it looks like the past, and that choice is brilliant, because it makes me feel as if I am watching the real events, not a film about them. I have watched No more than once, and each time I notice something new: a small joke, a quiet moment, a face in the crowd that tells a whole story on its own.

I also want to talk about Jackie, Spencer, and Maria, because these three films tell me something important about Larraín as a person. He is a man who is drawn to people who are trapped. Jackie Kennedy was trapped by grief and by history. Princess Diana was trapped by a palace and by a marriage that had died. Maria Callas was trapped by her own voice, by the fame that had made her and then left her alone. Larraín looks at these women with great tenderness, and he does not judge them. He shows them as human beings, not as symbols. I think that is a rare gift. It is easy to make a film about a famous woman and turn her into a saint or a victim. It is much harder to show her as a real person, with flaws, with anger, with humour, with moments of great strength and moments of great weakness. Larraín does the hard thing, and he does it beautifully.

Kristen Stewart in Spencer is a performance I think about often. She does not play Diana as a perfect princess. She plays her as a woman who cannot breathe, who is choking on rules and on expectations, who eats too much and then makes herself sick, who runs through the house looking for a door that will open. That is not a glamorous performance. It is a painful one, and it is honest. I believe Larraín gave Stewart the space to be that honest, and that is what a great director does. He does not force a performance. He creates a space where an actor can be brave, and then he watches, and he waits, and he keeps the camera running.

There is something else I admire about Larraín, and that is his patience. His films are slow. The camera does not move quickly. The scenes last a long time. In a world where most films cut every three seconds, where everything is loud and fast, Larraín’s slowness feels like a kind of courage. He is saying to me: slow down, look, listen, think. I do not always want to slow down. Sometimes I want a fast film, a funny film, an easy film. But when I give Larraín’s films my time, they reward me. They stay with me for days. I find myself thinking about a shot, a face, a silence, long after the film has ended. That is the mark of a great artist: the work does not leave you when you leave the cinema.

I also respect the way he built Fábula, his production company. He did not only think about himself. He built a place where other Chilean filmmakers could work, where young directors could find support, where Chilean stories could be told. That is a generous thing to do, and it is a difficult thing to do, because running a company takes time and energy away from making your own films. But Larraín did it, and Chilean cinema is stronger because of it. I think about that when I think about my own work, about whether I am only building something for myself or whether I am building something that will help other people too. Larraín’s example tells me that the second choice is the better one, even if it is harder.

There are things about his films that are hard for me, and I want to be honest about them. Sometimes his films are so quiet, so slow, so full of silence, that I lose my patience. Sometimes I wish he would explain more, tell me more clearly what he means, give me a moment of warmth or humour to hold on to. El Conde, his film about Pinochet as a vampire, is a film I found strange and disturbing, and I am not sure I fully understood it. But I also think that is part of the point. Larraín is not making films to make me comfortable. He is making films to make me think, and thinking is sometimes uncomfortable. I would rather watch a film that confuses me and stays with me than a film that is easy and forgettable.

What I take from Larraín’s story, for my own life, is this: your past does not have to be your prison, but you cannot escape it by ignoring it. Chile could not escape its history by pretending the dictatorship never happened. Larraín’s films look at that history directly, and in looking at it, they begin to heal it. In my own life, I have things I would rather not look at, mistakes I have made, times when I was not brave enough, times when I hurt someone. Larraín’s example tells me to look at those things, to tell the truth about them, and to trust that the truth, even when it is painful, is better than silence. Silence is what a dictatorship wants. Silence is what fear wants. Speaking, even quietly, even in a film, is an act of freedom.

I also learn from him that you do not have to leave home to matter to the world. Larraín could have moved to Hollywood and stayed there. He could have forgotten Chile. Instead, he kept his company in Santiago, kept working with Chilean actors, kept telling Chilean stories, and the world came to him. That gives me hope. It tells me that where you come from is not a limitation. It is a strength, if you are honest about it, if you look at it clearly, if you turn it into art that is true. Larraín turned Chile into art, and the world listened.

In the end, I think Pablo Larraín is one of the most important directors alive today, not because his films are the biggest or the loudest, but because they are the most honest. He looks at power, at grief, at fame, at history, and he shows me what they do to a human being. He does it with patience, with beauty, and with a quiet courage that I admire more every time I watch one of his films. I will keep watching, and I will keep thinking, and I will keep learning from a man who believed that a camera, held still in a quiet room, could tell the truth about a whole country.

I also want to say something about the way Larraín films famous women, because it tells me how he sees people. Jackie Kennedy, Princess Diana, Maria Callas: these are women the whole world thought it knew. Larraín does not give me the version I already know. He gives me the woman alone in a room, the woman who cannot sleep, the woman who is tired of being watched. He shows me that fame is not a gift. It is a weight. It is a house with too many windows, where everyone can see in and no one can see out. I think about that when I think about fame in my own life, about the pressure to be seen, to be liked, to be perfect in public. Larraín’s films tell me that the people we admire most are often the loneliest, and that kindness matters more than admiration. When I watch Spencer, I do not think about a princess. I think about a woman who wants to breathe, who wants to be herself, who wants to run through a field and feel free. That is a feeling I know, and Larraín makes me feel it again, as if it were my own.

There is one more thing I have learned from Larraín, and it is about silence. His films are full of silence: long shots where nobody speaks, rooms where the only sound is breathing, moments where the camera waits and the audience must wait too. In my own life, I am often afraid of silence. I fill it with noise, with talking, with music, with my phone. Larraín teaches me that silence is not empty. It is full. It is where thinking happens, where feeling happens, where truth lives. When I sit in silence after watching one of his films, I understand things I did not understand before. I understand my own life better. I understand the people around me better. That is a gift, and it is a gift that only a patient artist can give. I am grateful to Larraín for teaching me to be still, to look, to listen, and to trust that silence has something to say.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Pablo Larraín best known for around the world? Pablo Larraín is best known for No, the 2012 film about the Chilean referendum campaign that helped end the Pinochet dictatorship, which was nominated for an Academy Award. He is also widely known for his English-language films Jackie, Spencer, and Maria, portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy, Princess Diana, and Maria Callas.

Where was Pablo Larraín born and when? Pablo Larraín was born in Santiago, Chile, on 19 August 1976. He grew up in the Chilean capital during the years of military rule, in a family closely connected to politics, and that background shaped the subjects of his later films.

What is the production company Fábula that Larraín founded? Fábula is the Chilean production company Larraín founded with his brother Juan de Dios Larraín. It has produced many of his own films as well as work by other Chilean directors, and it has become one of the most important companies in Chilean cinema.

Which film of Pablo Larraín was nominated for an Oscar? No was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and it was the first Chilean film ever to receive an Oscar nomination. The film tells the story of the cheerful advertising campaign that helped the No vote win the 1988 referendum.

What is El Conde about? El Conde is a 2023 film in which Larraín imagines the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a vampire who has lived for two hundred and fifty years and now wants to die. It mixes black comedy, horror, and political satire, and it was shot in black and white.

Who plays Princess Diana in Spencer? Kristen Stewart plays Princess Diana in Spencer, Larraín’s 2021 film set over a single Christmas weekend at the royal family’s country house. Her performance was widely praised and earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.