Hedda (2025)

User Review

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  ScreenZealots

  7 / 10

  In a lush and biting reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, director Nia DaCosta’s mid-century English adaptation doesn’t so much modernize the play as it revives it, breathing into it the smoky tension of postwar ennui, queer desire, and racial politics hidden under pearls and privilege.
  
  Tessa Thompson’s Hedda is a marvel of contradictions. She’s radiant yet cruel and clever yet aimless, a woman so trapped by her gilded world she can only find freedom in destruction. Newly married to the well-meaning but hopelessly dull George (Tom Bateman), Hedda finds herself suffocating in a life of polite conversations and stifled ambition. Her solution? Light a match and burn it all to the ground.
  
  Over the course of one decadent evening (as the couple hosts a party they can’t afford), Hedda orchestrates a web of manipulation that threatens to ruin her husband’s rival along with anyone else foolish enough to get close.
  
  DaCosta brings a lush visual precision to the film, one where every frame gleams with opulence. There are chandeliers dripping with crystal, cigarette smoke curling around whispered betrayals, and silk gloves brushing against glasses of gin. But beneath all this richness and shimmer lies something rotten. The film’s dialogue-heavy structure is faithful to Ibsen’s talky original and feels heavily theatrical, with sharp-tongued conversations laced with venom. This is a literary adaptation that’s modernized in all the right ways.
  
  The updated representation feels both deliberate and organic. By recasting the world of Hedda with black and queer characters, DaCosta reclaims the narrative from its past and layers it with fresh tensions of race, class, gender, and identity. Interestingly, the film never asks the audience to actually like its characters. This is a world populated with elegant monsters and liars who are too clever for their own happiness. Hedda isn’t exactly an admirable heroine, but a woman who would rather destroy her world than live within its walls.
  
  In tandem with its subject matter, the film does have a detached feeling that often keeps the audience at a distance, which also means it will be an acquired taste. But literary-minded viewers will appreciate “Hedda” and its accurate, disturbing reflection of one woman’s rage.
  
  By: Louisa Moore / SCREEN ZEALOTS

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