HEDDA
(director/writer: Nia DaCosta; screenwriter: based on Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler; cinematographer: Sean Bobbit; editor: Jacob Secher Schulsinger; music: Hildur Guonadottir; cast: Tessa Thompson (Hedda Gabler), Nina Hoss (Eileen Loyborg), Imogen Poots (Thea Clifton), Tom Bateman (George Tesman), Nicholas Pinnock (Judge Roland Brack), Finbar Lynch (Professor Greenwood), Mirren Mack (Tabitha), Kathryn Hunter (Bertie, servant), Saffron Hocking (Jane Ji); Runtime: 107; MPAA Rating: R; producers: Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Gabrielle Nadig, Nia DaCosta, Tessa Thompson; Prime Video; 2025)
“Features characters who might not be the ones Ibsen could have imagined.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
The stylish film, shot in 5 acts and introduced through title cards, is based on the feminist 1891 Henrik Ibsen classic play Hedda Gabler. The female Black American filmmaker Nia DaCosta (“The Marvels”/”Little Woods”) is the writer/director of this updated drama on a proper lady who has a shameless nasty streak and is manipulative. DaCost’s Hedda is a Black woman who was in a queer relationship but remained sexually active with men. Ibsen never did the queer thing. The setting relocates from 19th-century Oslo to 1950s Great Britain.
The free-spirited bohemian and deviously clever Hedda (Tessa Thompson) is the bastard daughter of the gun-loving late General Gabler, who inherits his gun collection.
She marries the drab struggling college professor George Tesman (Tom Bateman), and they return from a long honeymoon abroad to her sprawling country luxury estate he bought for her. She throws a party on her estate attended by her old family friend, who helped her get the dream house and expects some sexual favors in return, Judge Roland Brack (Nicholas Pinnock), and many of her bohemian friends she slept with. Also invited is the college power-broker, Professor Greenwood (Finbar Lynch) and his wife Tabitha (Mirren Mack).
Upkeep on the estate and her rich lifestyle are too much of a burden for Hedda, as she fears losing the house because of inadequate finances. Therefore she throws the party to get hubby a high paid position and an endowment from the college so she can afford to keep the place.
Hedda becomes unnerved when her former older lesbian lover and her husband’s academic rival Eileen Loyborg (Nina Hoss), the now sober alcoholic, someone she still loves, who has invited herself to the party and brings along her delicate newest young lover Thea (Imogen Poots).
The film takes place entirely at the party. The men (all with underwritten parts) can’t match wits with the clever women, as they count on their societal status to get by.
It’s modestly comical, with lots of sapphic humor, and with splendid unnerving performances by Thompson, Hoss and Poots. It concludes with a bloody climax that features characters who might not be the ones Ibsen could have imagined.
Though I found fault with its slipshod editing, its murky images and how at times its execution was rather clunky, I was still impressed by the unique way it put a different face on the crusty outdated play.
It played at the Toronto Film Festival.
REVIEWED ON 9/27/2025 GRADE: B-
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