NYFF 64: “Clarissa” is the best “Mrs. Dalloway” adaptation you’ll ever see
Sunday, October 4, 2026 at 10:00AM 
Between Wuthering Heights and The Odyssey, much has been said this year about the merits and demerits of film adaptations straying from their source material. Most of the time, I’m a defender of unfaithfulness in the transformation of a text between mediums. Indeed, some of the most interesting aspects of both those box office success stories are precisely the dialogues established between them and their literary origins, deviation as conversation. Moreover, the general public’s idea of fidelity to a text can be superficial, to say the least, and believe me, I’m trying to be diplomatic in my choice of words here. Some would say Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Clarissa is a wild re-imagining of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, unfaithful as can be in its transposition of a narrative set in post-WWI England to contemporary Nigeria.
They would be wrong. Not because the Esiri brothers don’t do what I’ve just described, but because, in this gesture, they have managed to capture the essence of Mrs. Dalloway in ways no other cineaste has to this day. Step aside, Gorris and Daldry, for there are new masters of putting Woolf on screen to join Sally Potter in her tiny pantheon. And it’s precisely through their changes to the classic novel that they manage to make Clarissa the best Mrs. Dalloway we’re likely to see in the annals of film history, yesteryear’s and those to come, purists be damned…
As much a city symphony for modern-day Lagos as a Woolf adaptation, Clarissa contemplates Nigeria's biggest city as a kingdom of contrasts. Classes are geographically divided, segregated across the metropolis by infrastructure, by accents, with even the ambient sound seeming to follow the rules of such hierarchies. Only the wealthy can enjoy quiet, a rich silence that’s still warm with the buzz of life. For the dispossessed, such silence only exists in memory, in nightmares of the past coming back to haunt them, distorted by time and trauma into a void-like absence of any sound. Unless, of course, it’s the noise of death, of gunshots and bloody violence. Then, it’s loud, deafening, the all-consuming silence turning into something altogether opposite but just as voracious.
You may not realize it as you watch Clarissa, but these sonic disparities linger in the spectator’s memory. And they’re joined by visual cues of similar meaningfulness. Consider the opening, a sensualist dream, perchance a memory, floating through the natural landscape at night, by the river’s edge. And that’s before it finds sweaty, shimmering bodies, satiated from a good fuck and made into ghostly shades by the mosquito net protecting them, enshrining them in a little pocket universe of their own satisfaction. Such sensuality gives way to the clashing cacophony of Lagos of today, bodies laboring, perspiring and beautiful, but not in the same languorous way as the moneyed elites. Compositions are either fragments or stuffed to the gills with activity.
And above them all, Clarissa and her peers float by on chauffeured cars. That’s not to say they are made to seem callous or dehumanized by their obvious privilege, for the Esiris’ camera is generous toward every person it looks upon, be they the proletariat or the one percent. Not to mention that, as Woolf’s novel communicates through parallel characterizations, intangible connections tie together how people from different classes experience life. Many of both factions inhabit the present only physically, their consciousness, perchance their souls, forever lost to the siren call of bygone days. Not that the adult Clarissa, as embodied by a sublime Sophie Okonedo, would admit to that without putting up the pretense of a fight.
From the moment she wakes up, the woman is living within and for the perfect curation of her aspirational lifestyle. Like Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, she’s preparing to host a party later that day, framed by flowers, giving orders left and right to an army of servants that dutifully respond to her airy, ever-soft and unforceful, yet authoritative, command. While DP Jonathan Bloom and costume designer Eniola Dawodu seek to find the eroticism in every body, Okonedo’s Clarissa almost seems to resist it, using her place of social power to make herself into a non-sociopathic Harriet Craig as re-imagined by Ousmane Sembène. She’s a mistress of the house that’s so committed to her vision that she makes herself into an object not unlike the mosaic above the couch, which must be displayed at just the right angle.
Memories beckon, they pull Clarissa and her contemporaries – a patrician politician husband, former friends and former lovers, acquaintances half-forgotten, parents whose ghosts still make themselves heard – away from their separate adult lives back to a summer full of youthful possibility when they were all together, united by the dream of their own future. We slip into them as we watch the film, for neither the Esiri brothers nor editor Blair McClendon makes a big deal about announcing when or why a present-day scene has suddenly shifted to a remembrance. You must pay attention to discern the when, and engage with the cinematic text in an active manner to surmise the why. It was a time full of romance and radical thought, of those who looked past their comfort and believed themselves special.
They spoke of colonialism’s shadow over the land, their lives, their customs, and manifested against the patriarchal expectations of them. The women did, for they saw that to be married, to become a wife, a mother, killed their individual identity in some fundamental manner. At least, Sally did, always the enlightened woman Clarissa struggled to be. Then again, did our Mrs. Dalloway by another name want to be like her friend or be with her friend? Hard to say, especially when Sally was so prone to tell the truth about what she saw in others, delineating, before she even knew it, how a patriarch’s influence would change a modern young woman into a housewife who would agree that servants shouldn’t serve their betters without gloves on. She saw Clarissa’s bourgeois banality from the beginning.
But did she also see it in herself? Perhaps not. The film’s lucid camera does, just as it probes the humanity in all these people, even as it might also express disappointment in who they have let themselves become for the contemporary portions of the narrative. In that thought, the cinematic apparatus is not too distant from the characters themselves, who look back at sweet memories now clouded by regret. Because nothing came of it, of their ideas, their ideals, not even their desires. Touch was so important back then, even to the visual idioms the Esiris employed to capture the “before.” For the moneyed elites, their “now” is touch-starved, deprived of intimacy and, more calamitous of all, meaning.
The young cast of these flashbacks, led by India Ria Amarteifio as Clarissa and Ayo Edebiri as Sally, is pitch-perfect, but their excellence can’t hold a candle to all that Okonedo manages to convey in her much less demonstrative register. Consider Clarissa’s re-encounter with an old suitor and erstwhile poet, played by David Oyelowo. Then and there, the Esiris deploy slow motion as if to demand the audience study their leading lady, appreciate how she swallows nostalgia along with the instinct of unmediated joy. Her expression opens up, a spontaneous wonderment. But that spontaneity is almost immediately subsumed by control, the sight of a woman who’s, consciously or not, designing and measuring the architecture of her smile. It’s second-nature.
On another occasion, Okonedo will be more enigmatic, closed off, yet allow her expression to be just as pregnant with a meaning her character’s life lacks. It’s when her seamstress comes for an emergency fitting and her ex-soldier husband stands about in the garden. An empty woman recognizes herself in an empty man. He is Fortune Nwafor’s Septimus, the text’s other protagonist, as it’s always been since Mrs. Dalloway’s first telling. There’s the hostess and there’s the shell-shocked combatant. He, too, loses himself in memories, though they are of a different quality to Clarissa’s. I’ve described their sound, but the images have a painterly rigor to them, and the editing always returns to elliptical structures, brutality abstracted in a Lynne Ramsay-like evasion.
They are kindred spirits just as they are the product of a Nigeria still acclimating to an imperfect democracy, haunted by military powers and civil unrest. One experienced these horrors in the flesh, while the other saw it all from a distance, safe in her ivory tower, with a mother-in-law who speaks of how to better the country while drinking from gold-painted bone china. They’ll never know each other, yet they meet in this instant, this shared frame of her enigmatic gaze and his reflection. Inevitably, it all comes together in the night of the party, when the soldier takes his own life and a memory of sensual fulfillment brings Clarissa, character and film, down to a most unfulfilled reality, regarding herself in the mirror and seeing an existential question mark for which she has no answer. This is what I mean by the spirit of Woolf’s novel being preserved.
No matter the radical transformations to the text, Mrs. Dalloway lives in Clarissa, in these people who all put their great futures behind them and settled. So far, I’ve compared the Esiri’s work to many of the great masters and I’ll add Antonioni to the mix while also underlining that this is a cinema all their own, impressionistic and haptic in equal measure, political in its discourse but far from didactic in its conclusions. In fact, their Clarissa ends in suspension, dancing the night away, performing to the memory of happy days forgotten and trying to act out the feeling that once warmed her heart. It ends on Okonedo, because of course it does, her tour de force all the more impressive for how much it avoids insisting upon its greatness. But she is great, a marvel, a miracle, and so is Clarissa.
After a Cannes premiere in the Director’s Fortnight and a North American premiere at TIFF, Clarissa is now part of the Main Slate at the 64th NYFF. NEON will release it theatrically later this year, with a limited run starting December 11.
Reader Comments (3)
to Claudio's point about faithfulness to the novel, films have been making their own interpretations for years. My favorite version of Macbeth is Throne of Blood, even though it is not spoken in the English language, nor set in Scotland but feudal Japan. Jurassic Park the novel and Jurassic Park the film have very little in common except for dinosaurs and characters with the same names but both have been equally celebrated by fans. If film interprets the medium of written word and captures the sense or some kind of authenticity then I consider it a successful adaptation.
I am happy Okonedo is getting attention she deserves. There seem to be lots of open slots in Best Actress this year so I hope she gets in.
I was already so excited for this movie, and your review has made me even more psyched. Excellent write-up hun.
TomG -- I am very skeptical of criticism of adaptations that posit faithfulness or lack thereof as the main tenet from which to dismiss said adaptation. The mediums are so different, both doing things the other cannot, so the experience of a literary work will never match that of a film, no matter how faithful one tries to be. Glad you're also happy for Okonedo. She's such an underrated actress.
Joanna -- Thank you! Love reading your NYFF write-ups, too.