Hedda review – Ibsen gets a Saltburn makeover in Amazon’s ill-advised romp

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Henrik Ibsen’s second-most famous play, Hedda Gabler, has been plenty messed around with in recent years. There was a much-derided stage production starring Mary-Louise Parker. There was Liz Meriwether’s sci-fi reimagining, Heddatron. And now there is Nia DaCosta’s film Hedda, a rejiggering of the narrative that places a premium on subterfuge and sexual intrigue. It sometimes lands its intended jolt, but too often mistakes arch style for profundity.

That was also true of DaCosta’s Candyman sequel, an endlessly attractive film that was an otherwise confused update of the 1992 classic. Hedda fares better; it’s the work of a more assured and restrained writer-director, one who is willing to, on occasion, let visual flash take a backseat to more mechanical matters of storytelling. But there is nonetheless a recklessness to DaCosta’s version, its brash iconoclasm throws both baby and bathwater out of the manor-house window.

The action has been transposed from 19th century Oslo to 1950s Great Britain, where former bohemian free-spirit Hedda (Tessa Thompson) has moved into a sprawling estate with her new husband, pinched and humorless academic George (Tom Bateman). They’ve decided to throw a party, ostensibly to celebrate the house and their return from a long honeymoon, but actually functioning as a way to secure George a crucial teaching position. DaCosta immediately foreshadows that the bash is going to end badly, sending Hedda stalking around the place with a wicked strut, pistol in hand. An old friend – really, an old lover – has just phoned to say she’ll stop by and Hedda seems both unnerved and invigorated by the news.

What Hedda plans to do about the impending arrival of Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss) – who is an academic rival of George’s and a mostly out lesbian who refuses to acquiesce to social code in the way that Hedda is at least partially willing to – is, essentially, the mystery of DaCosta’s film. It’s a mousetrap sort of affair, a jury-rigged evening of cruel manipulation all serving Hedda’s grand design for self-preservation.

Which is certainly one facet of Ibsen’s play; Hedda has always been a bit cunning and ruthless, always steadfastly determined to keep herself in the finer things. But DaCosta turns her into a remorseless sociopath. She goes for bite and nastiness in the way of, say, Saltburn, badly boiling away the complexity of one of modern theater’s great characters.

DaCosta takes some pains to tease out an idea of why Hedda has become this way: she is closeted and cosseted, she is Black in a largely white ecosystem, she not unjustifiably fears what may become of her should she lose her tenuous purchase on status. That argument is muddled, though. Race is glancingly mentioned but then never engaged with in a meaningful way. The film has more to say about sexuality, but depictions of queer repression’s dark consequence have been rendered more thoughtfully elsewhere. DaCosta fails to make a properly convincing case for her Hedda’s awful misdeeds.

Thompson tears into the role, plummy accent and all. Her line readings are alternately blithe and venomous, she casts sly and calculating looks across rooms, she coils around her prey with seductive menace. It’s fun to watch, but it’s also too grandly villainous. DaCosta sends Thompson tearing through the film without the guardrails of nuance or credible complication.

Then Hoss storms across the film’s ballroom, dragging the tablecloth with her. Hoss’s performance is a marvel; so marvelous, in fact, that DaCosta can’t help but shift the whole focus of the film onto her. Here is the picture of patriarchy’s warping effect that the film wants to paint elsewhere, here is the worthy and compelling figure of feminist outrage and frustration. As the film follows Eileen (who is a man called Eilert in the original play) on her dismal downward spiral, it finally whips up an unignorable resonance. Hedda, meanwhile, is left to plot in the periphery, making her seem all the more psychotically vicious.

There is maybe indication in DaCosta’s script that said psychotic viciousness is, in fact, some sort of manic depression that has been plaguing poor Hedda. But making that diagnosis requires too much work on the audience’s part, and perhaps too much familiarity with the original text. Watched in a vacuum – which, ideally, adaptations should be able to withstand – DaCosta’s Hedda is an annihilating and ultimately empty portrait of one woman destroying another out of the most basic, boilerplate motivation.

Still, there is the wonder of Hoss’s breakneck work, and the sensory pleasures of DaCosta’s design. She captures the film’s nightmare party in richly saturated color, drenched in the golden glow of practical lighting. DaCosta dexterously moves her camera between rooms, gliding through scenes with smooth, exciting momentum. It’s an impressive feat of technical film-making, which has now become a hallmark of DaCosta’s work. But she caves to baser impulses in reinterpreting an old and, some might say, crusty play. There is a better Hedda Gabler to be made in this modernist, eye-popping mode. It just shouldn’t be one that so readily cheapens a character who’s earned over a century of close and careful attention, for good reason.