Review: Nia DaCosta reinvents Ibsen with "Hedda"

by Cláudio Alves

You might be excused for believing Nia DaCosta has decided to reinvent Hedda Gabler as some sort of retro-styled procedural when her newfangled Ibsen adaptation opens with the familiar noirish scenario of detectives inquiring about a night of revelry, mystery, and violence. Tessa Thompson certainly looks the part of a midcentury femme fatale, all performative insouciance and bedecked in the glamour of a 1950s dressing gown, demure enough to look appropriate yet belying an informality that could read as indecent. It's all a show with Hedda as the director, playwright, and star. Indeed, she's so luminous it's like staring straight at the sun and flirting with blindness. She's the dawn of a new day, and those around her are night, perishing by her light…

Like all good noirs and noir wannabes, the woman under the police's interrogating gaze takes the audience's hand down memory lane, leading us back 24 hours from this fateful morning. If possible, yesterday started even more dramatically than the prologue's present day, at least for Hedda. The camera finds her emerging from the lake that blossoms over the expanse of her property, heavy rocks tumbling down her figure as she makes her way back inside. Those suicide aids didn't fulfill their purpose and this desperate woman is bound to live. She is the creature of Ibsen's play but she's something original, too, full of mysteries of her own.

Still, there's little time to linger on the psychological turmoil, and in any case neither DaCosta nor Thompson is much inclined to pursue such storytelling avenues. Hedda's set to play hostess at a formidable house party later that night, and she's busy as can be. From soaked anguish, she changes into a bombshell red number that slashes across the screen, the stroke of a brush dipped in that radioactive-looking blood so typical of 1970s Italian horrors. From early on, costume designer Lindsay Pugh and DP Sean Bobbitt are co-conspirators, pushing for a stylistic take on Hedda that exults splendor and operatic spectacle, a modicum of excess that befits the protagonist.

Everything shines lustrous, as if freshly polished, burnished, lacquered, and satin-finished within an inch of its life. The effect is curious, conveying the dramatic space as something decadent, altogether distant from most stagings of this classic play. Along with production designer Cara Bower, these artisans evoke glimmers of copper and gold, conveying the sense that this entire story unfolds within the interior of a jewelry box or, perhaps, a cut-crystal bowl full of candy, ready to be devoured. The beauty highlights the cruelties at play, the richness underlines the precarious position of a woman whose lifestyle depends on her academic husband's victory over a rival. 

DaCosta changes the original text aplenty, transporting it in time and geographic setting, making Hedda a Black woman full of social ambition born to a British general and into a circle who whispers about her duskiness. She also turns Eilert, the husband's adversary and Hedda's former lover, into Eileen, queering a story that now takes place almost exclusively on the night of the big party. More importantly, the director takes cues from Ibsen's resistance to psychology, preferring to steep her film and audience in the character's contradictions rather than explain them. Perhaps Hedda tries to understand its namesake too much, just the same, but the enigma remains.

Thompson's performance contributes to that quality, in tune with the aesthetic as she walks imperious through Hedda's estate, with a commanding step and an airy voice. In the span of a line, she can run the gamut from petulant to playful, to mocking, to cold, to wild, all with an accent that wouldn't be out of place among RADA's toniest pupils. The American actress indulges in British intonations and delivers the dialogue as if it's sweet caramel melting on her tongue, which only adds to a sense of perpetual insincerity. Even when at her most vulnerable and open, Thompson's Hedda appears to be acting out a fiction of herself. Albeit, not in a distant, calculating manner.

For all that she manipulates every person that crosses her path, this 2025 Hedda Gabler is a victim of her own whims, a bundle of intrusive thoughts in the shape of a beautiful agent of chaos. She can't help herself and is fully aware of this, couching even the most startling cruelties in the notion that the queen bee might well come to regret her doings, but, in the moment, is unable to control the unstoppable force coming from within. Is this the best, most persuasive, or cogent reading of Ibsen's heroine? Maybe not. Nevertheless, I can't help but applaud artists willing to go against the paramountcy of sacred cows and attack classic texts with a specific point of view. 

Because the alternative is redundancy, adaptations without purpose beyond repeating what's already been said and done since time immemorial. There's no better example of the value of reinvention than Eileen's entrance. So far into the film, the woman has been a topic of almost constant discussion, especially when it concerns Thea, her skittish current paramour and co-author of a paper that awaits publication. The girl arrived at Hedda's long before her companion, begging the hostess to contain herself and respect Eileen's newfound sobriety and desire to start anew. But of course, our titular diva has no intention of doing so.

Imogen Poots delivers wet pity to an almost grotesque extent, prostrating herself before Hedda and the audience in ways that further the urgency of the academic's arrival and spell the disaster to come. When Eileen finally comes, she's a resplendent Nina Hoss, spotted by the heroine and the camera before most have acknowledged her. Everything is immaculate and perverse about the scene, starting with Pugh's costume for Eileen, a provocation in rustling navy silks with a bodice that cradles the actress' bosom in gossamer wrappings, hinting at nudity without revealing it altogether. Well, at least not for now. A dip in the lake might change that.

The pièce de résistance is the double dolly shot with which the director makes Hedda float across the ballroom, eyes fixated, expression besotted, hands caressing the cleavage the plunging neckline of her envious green dress leaves bare. It's so florid as to risk absurdity, but it works within the milieu DaCosta has set up so far. Furthermore, Hoss' charismatic dismissals quickly pour vinegar down our throats, dispelling the daze with a tossed-off assurance that she has missed Hedda – like one misses an inflamed appendix. The director might not be able to maintain this balance, ripe on the verge of rot, for the entire movie. But, for one moment, it's perfect.

Part of the reason Hedda doesn't sustain this level of greatness throughout its 107-minute runtime falls on how unengaging most of the cast is, besides the duet of Thompson and Hoss, each chewing the scenery like they're Bette Davis resurrected and ravenous for some tasty set dressing. A willingness to be absurd is at the heart of both thespians' success, though the German star falls closer to traditional conceptions of prestige drama acting than her American colleague, who's all too willing to camp it up and liberate herself from the restraints of good taste. The whole film is like that in some ways, though its totality doesn't pull off the gambit as well as the goddess duo by itself.

Hildur Guðnadóttir's score is another hindrance. The jazzy sound is appreciated, alright, but the music is obsessed with punctuating lines and exchanges to an almost comical degree. For the director who got Thompson and Hoss to deliver these firecracker performances, DaCosta seems awfully unconfident that her actors can modulate the dialogue and get its meaning across, relying on the score to define the tone in a show of abject superfluity. And then there's the ending, which escapes Ibsen more decisively than anything that came before. While one wants to commend the audacity on display, this is one point at which reinvention falls flat. 

I'd go so far as saying that the altered conclusion prevents the film from sticking the landing in a most calamitous fashion. It's not all lost, of course, but nearly. Nevertheless, what precedes the misstep is a fun, ferocious good time at the movies that presents the rare opportunity for a Black actress to experiment with the classics of European theater on screen and to offer a characterization of a deeply messed-up figure who needs not make apologies for her own monstrousness. At the end of the whole shebang, that amorality might be where Hedda shines brightest, willfully refusing to judge its titular character to the bitter end.

After a sojourn through the festival circle and a brief theatrical release, Hedda arrives on Amazon Prime Video tomorrow, October 29. Don't miss it!