There’s so much talent behind Nia DaCosta’s provocative adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler that it’s easy to embrace as an inventive artistic experiment. But also, there is so much talent behind Hedda that it’s especially disappointing when the initial sparks eventually fizzle out.
DaCosta has updated Ibsen’s stage play in intriguing ways, moving the story from 1891 Norway to a 1950s English estate, expanding on Hedda’s sexuality, and reimagining one of the main characters entirely.
Tessa Thompson (so good in DaCosta’s 2018 debut, Little Woods) plays venomous newlywed Hedda with an ostentatiously clipped British accent, chewing wickedly on each word. Her self-conscious approach is echoed in Tár composer Hildur Guonadóttir’s aggressively insistent score. With its increasingly desperate villain, operatic nemesis, and heavy musical cues, DaCosta interprets the struggles of societally-bound women as a form of horror story, a genre in which she’s especially adept (see 2021’s haunting Candyman).
For a while, her louche directorial touches give her own scathing screenplay an unsettling, avant-garde theatricality. Sean Bobbitt’s gorgeous cinematography is particularly attuned to this approach, gliding coolly through the enormous manor in which a grasping Hedda and her pathetic husband George (Tom Bateman) throw a hedonistic party. Imogen Poots, Nicholas Pinnock and Finbar Lynch are good value as revellers united only by their hidden motivations.
It swoons where it should wound
We can see from the start that George and Hedda’s actual life looks nothing like the glamorous image they’re working so hard to portray. But the real problems begin when German actress Nina Hoss arrives, sweeping imperially in as Hedda’s former lover – and George’s potential rival – Eileen (a notable change from the masculine Eilert in Ibsen’s play).
Her startling entrance threatens to topple the party – and the film. Hoss is so good, and her Eileen so beautifully human, that we ache for her pain. In contrast, Thompson’s Hedda is too arch to connect with. Her machinations, which are intended to reflect a range of personal and societal complexities, seem spiteful and petty.
Worse, though, is that Hedda’s story starts to feel small, in comparison to Hoss’s majestically tragic heroine. As an adaptation, Hedda flashes with imagination. But as a defiantly eccentric drama, it swoons where it should wound.
In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Oct 24. Streaming on Prime Video in the US Oct 29.