Hedda

Last summer, fans of the pseudo-zombie movie 28 Days Later finally got a new sequel with 28 Years Later, both directed by Danny Boyle. In just a few months, Nia DaCosta continues the story with another sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.

In the meantime, you can check out DaCosta's take on Henrik Ibsen's celebrated antiheroine, Hedda Gabler, on Amazon Prime. Let's see what I thought about Hedda.

There's no concrete year of its setting, but it's obviously a few decades since Gabler's 1891 premiere. Here, we find Hedda (Tessa Thompson) in England, having just returned from her honeymoon with her scholarly husband, George (Tom Bateman). Between the honeymoon and their new house, the Tesmans are very much in debt. But there's a big party tonight, and George hopes to use the occasion to butter-up his chums into giving him a big professorship. George hopes that Hedda won't do anything drastic ...

Among the guests are Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss) and her new lover, Thea Elvsted (Imogen Poots), both of whom are acquainted with Hedda (Eileen especially). Eileen is now George's chief academic rival, who hopes to secure her professorship with a "revolutionary" manuscript. Basically, Hedda decides to push Eileen off the wagon, away from Thea, and out of George's way to secure her future. Oh look, something drastic is about to happen!

Previously, Hedda's been played by the likes of Glenda Jackson, Cate Blanchett, Ingrid Bergman and Fiona Shaw. I've read the play in college, but I haven't seen any of those prior performances, not even Jackson's Oscar-nominated take, so I can't compare them to Thompson's. Her Hedda swings from desperation to sociopathy without a moment's notice. One minute, she's overwhelmed by the stress of her married life; the next, she remorselessly nudges Eileen to suicide. It's not that easy to sympathize with her, though Thompson is still compelling in either of Hedda's moods. Her ambiguous end will leave you a lot to think about.

Hoss, who also played Hedda on stage, is simply dynamite as Eileen, a rewrite of the play's Ejlert Lovborg. Once she first arrives, she exponentially struggles under societal pressure to stay "on the straight and narrow." She knows that any slip-up will ruin her reputation several times over. Once Hedda covertly steals the manuscript, Eileen becomes a pitiful drunken mess and knows it. Throughout the film, you can feel her internal pressures rise with Hedda and Thea, which makes most of her poor judgements tragically understandable. Still, the same ending provides a bit of hope for her.

Bateman and Poots are fine in their roles, so who else do we have? For starters, Kathryn Hunter shows up as George's Aunt Bertie, who has a pretty amusing, yet overlong monologue at the halfway point. We also have Nicholas Pinnock, whose villainous Judge Brack helps us pity Hedda at the end. There's also Jamael Westman, whose David is involved in an amusing side-plot with Professor Greenwood (Finbar Lynch). He's also involved in Eileen's attempted suicide, though it's edited and filmed so haphazardly (by Sean Bobbitt & Jacob Schlesinger) that it's kind of confusing to watch. It's pretty surprising, considering how a prior fake-out was perfectly unnerving. The production and costume designs are fine, but I was more wowed by Hildur Guðnadóttir's intense score.

Hedda's various tweaks to its presentation didn't bother me. What slightly bemuses me is its moral whiplashes, though maybe I missed a few things along the way. As I said before, Hedda isn't an easy character to like, and Thompson gets that point across rather well. Check it out if you're curious. Unlike its cast, you'll survive a few hours in Hedda's world. I think I said enough.