Dir/Wri: Nia DaCosta | Cast: Tessa Thompson, Nina Hoss, Imogen Poots, Tom Bateman, Nicholas Pinnock, Finbar Lynch | US Drama 107’ 2025
Hedda Gabler is an 1890 play by Norway’s Henrik Ibsen. Here, in her third literary adaptation, a witty chamber piece set over the course of an evening in a splendid Arts and Crafts mansion in the English countryside, Nia DaCosta puts the focus on three women who are trapped by various societal constraints.
The heroine Hedda (a game Thompson) has just acquired her dream house and returned, newly pregnant, from a long honeymoon with her diffident husband George (Bateman) who is struggling to pay for it all.
Hedda is like Moliere’s Celimene, adoring the limelight as she revels in her machiavellian manoeuvres the witty dialogue tripping lightly from her voluptuous red lips. And Thompson is a real master of seduction as she reels in her victims. Her schtick is an in-depth knowledge of firearms garnered from her father, a general, and this all comes in handy in the fizzing finale. On the one hand, she is fending off Judge Brack (a magnetic Pinnock) and is also recovering from an affair with writer Eileen (a feisty Hoss with a boosted embonpoint) who is set to publish a novel co-written by her current lover the rather bedraggled Thea (Poots) who has recently left her husband and also desperately needs money. Like a beautiful wounded bird that she is, Hedda can’t quite resign herself to the dull marital bed ‘after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue’.
Although slightly overstaying its welcome in the final stretch as the characters unravel overwrought by too much alcohol that
only serves to heighten their predicaments, this is a lively costume drama sparkling with spicy repartee ricocheting around the lavish domestic settings that vibrate in Sean Bobbitt’s camerawork, all enlivened by Hildur Gudnadottir’s jazzy score. @MeredithTaylor
BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2025