Hedda
Nia DaCosta updates and reimagines Hedda Gabler to nobody’s advantage.
Tessa Thompson, Nina Hoss and Imogen Poots
Photo courtesy of Metfilm Distribution.
For some years now it has not been uncommon to find classic plays of a much earlier age being staged in London in what is often described as a new version by a contemporary writer. That has usually meant that the dialogue has been modernised or that the play’s period setting has been ignored or that even more drastic alterations have been made. When I heard of Hedda, Nia DaCosta's film based on Henrik Ibsen's play Hedda Gabler first staged in 1891, it sounded as though cinema was catching up on this idea. After all, this treatment by DaCosta herself is now set in mid-20th century England and by turning Hedda's ex-lover Eilert Lovborg into a woman named Eileen Lovborg it brings in a lesbian element that was not there before. But in the event, it is not these factors that define this film but the fact that what was originally presented as a realistic, thought-provoking drama has been converted into a self-conscious piece of melodrama.
Bearing in mind that many of today's cinemagoers will have no awareness of Ibsen’s play, DaCosta sensibly starts off by hooking the audience with a promise of violence to come. Ahead of the credits we have a brief opening scene in which police officers are questioning Hedda (Tessa Thompson) about how a lavish party at the newly acquired home of Hedda and her husband George Tesman (Tom Bateman) led to violence in the form of a shooting. She is asked to describe what happened and to start at the beginning and this is a cue for the film to tell most of the story in flashback. The plot which now unfolds is certainly based on Ibsen’s masterpiece but in addition to the other changes it unfolds here over the course of the one evening.
As in the play, the story centres on Hedda’s dissatisfaction with the role which society imposes on women. As the daughter of General Gabler (a relationship emphasised by Ibsen even in his chosen title), she has inherited strength and wilfulness but finds few openings in life available to her. In the circumstances she has married George and sets out to aid his chances of getting a professorship but Eileen (Nina Hoss) re-enters her life by turning up for the party and it emerges that as an academic and an author she is George's rival for the university post. Consequently, Hedda wants Eileen to fail in this respect. But even more significant is her jealousy on learning that her old school friend, Thea (Imogen Poots), has taken up with Eileen thus replacing her in Eileen's affections while also assisting her in her writing, that being a creative role beyond anything that Hedda herself has accomplished. The collaboration between Eileen and Thea has led to a new and as yet unpublished book which Eileen believes to be far and away her best yet and Hedda is now driven by a desire to sabotage its chances of publication and to bring down Eileen herself.
In adapting the play in such a drastic way Nia DaCosta is clearly asking us to view her treatment of it as something distinct that exists in its own right. But the problem is that what she offers is so poor in itself. Hedda Gabler as created by Ibsen was one of the great stage creations, a complex figure who behaved so deplorably that she could be considered a villainess but who at the same time recognised and resisted the expectations and constraints inherent in society’s treatment of women (a view that put her in line with Ibsen himself). Furthermore, she could be a woman of iron will and that would ultimately lead to an heroic refusal to live under subjugation to a man who had come to have power over her, Judge Brack (Nicholas Pinnock). However, the conniving Hedda offered by DaCosta is no more than a showcase for Tessa Thompson to command the screen with the conniving villainy largely overshadowing the subtleties. Furthermore, the major changes merely come across as trendy. By making Lovborg a woman the work may give a central place to lesbianism but it has nothing to say on the subject that would validate the decision to bring it in. Similarly, the role of Judge Brack, a striking example of male power in the original, is not only reduced in significance but is so cast that a black actor takes the role yet without his colour becoming in any way meaningful as part of the tale’s comments on society.
Hedda is not entirely without merit in that it is a widescreen movie possessed of strong production values and has been expertly photographed by Sean Bobbitt. Also, while the male actors lose out because their roles are now less effective, the lead actresses (Thompson, Hoss and Poots) are all committed, but they do suffer from DaCosta’s approach. Quite apart from the issues that arise from her rewriting of Ibsen, as director she embraces melodrama to an exceptional extent. This is perhaps best illustrated by the music score which she has obtained from Hildur Guðnadóttir with its emphasis on drums as well as on other forms of percussion and which at not infrequent intervals draws attention to itself like a nudge in the ribs. It points up the melodrama by drawing attention to the artificial and exaggerated nature of the piece while the directorial hand also makes itself very conspicuously felt. This comes in through such features as excessive use of editing in certain scenes and by treating numerous episodes in which two people are conversing in ways which come across as stilted and contrived instead of presenting them in a simple and straightforward flow. This makes the words here sound staged and adds to the sense of everything being set up. Put these elements together and what we have is not a piece which like, say, Saltburn (2023) directly relishes the more extreme aspects of melodrama but a work which is so knowingly played with reference to its adopted style that it suggests postmodernism in the sense of being cinema that offers self-referential awareness of the hand that it is playing. Consequently, for all the efforts of the actors concerned, Hedda exists only in its own world and never becomes a story that one can believe in for a moment. For some viewers it's just possible that that may have its own appeal, but to apply it to a text drawing on Ibsen’s superb play is to emphasise what a limited exercise this film is.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Tessa Thompson, Nina Hoss, Imogen Poots, Nicholas Pinnock, Tom Bateman, Finbar Lynch, Mirren Mark, Saffron Hocking, Kathryn Hunter, Jack Barry, Jamael Westman, Sam Hoare, Michelle Crane.
Dir Nia DaCosta, Pro Nia DaCosta, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Gabrielle Nadig and Tessa Thompson, Screenplay Nia DaCosta, based on the play by Henrik Ibsen, Ph Sean Bobbitt, Pro Des Cara Brower, Ed Jacob Schulsinger, Music Hildur Guðnadóttir, Costumes Lindsay Pugh.
Orion Pictures/Plan B Entertainment/Viva Maude-Metfilm Distribution.
107 mins. USA. 2025. US Rel: 22 October 2025. UK Rel: 24 October 2025. Cert. 15.
