HEDDA (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Hedda, Amazon MGM Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 22, 2025

An adaptation of a late 19th century play, even one as esteemed as Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, is not something one expects to call thrilling. With Hedda, writer/director Nia DaCosta, though, has turned the Norwegian playwright's story of an unhappy woman who tries to take control of the lives and fates of others into something quite thrilling.

The basic plot and characters remain the same, which will only matter those who know the source material and care about some degree of faithfulness, but DaCosta shifts the setting from Ibsen's contemporary time and place (the city that is now Oslo) to a manor in the English countryside at some point during the 1950s. More to the sheer and seemingly unstoppable momentum of the main character's plans and schemes, the plot here unfolds over the course of a single party at that manor house.

DaCosta's results are rather dizzying, really, and they also make a lot of dramatic sense. The protagonist may be cunning, but she's not exactly precise or careful in her efforts to sabotage and destroy other people in order to raise her own potential fortunes and stature. Putting this version of Hedda Gabler, played with beguiling charm and unsettling cruelty by Tessa Thompson, into this particular situation, where she essentially has to improvise her plans within a certain amount of limited time, makes the plot easier to digest. It also amplifies just how cold, calculating, and callous our protagonist appears.

Hedda has recently married an academic named George Tesman (Tom Bateman), although one would be hard-pressed to see this marriage as a happy, stable, or even advisable one for either party. George is a dull man, while Hedda has lived quite the exciting life until now. At dinner, George himself reveals that he spent the couple's six-month honeymoon doing research, and when a party guest suggests Hedda's appetites surely mean the couple must have done other things, the husband adds that, yes, they did go to some nice restaurants, too. She doesn't even want to be known by her husband's surname, preferring to keep her father's for reasons that become evident soon enough.

These two don't even seem to have much to talk about between each other, except that George is in line for a professorship and an endowment at his university. That means more money for the couple—maybe enough, even, to pay for this old manor, its upkeep, and its staff. Shortly after the two met and went for a walk in the country, Hedda filled a gap in conversation—what must be a constant for the couple—by saying she'd like to live in this house on a whim. The smitten and eager George found a way to buy it, mostly by taking a loan from Hedda's old family friend Judge Roland Brack (Nicholas Pinnock).

In other words, the pressure to impress Professor Greenwood (Finbar Lynch), who will be deciding George's professional fate, is high from the start of this story, which actually begins with Hedda about to drown herself in a lake near the house. She's stopped at the last moment by a servant calling to Hedda that she has a phone call. At tonight's party, an old acquaintance is planning to make an appearance, and the news that Hedda will be seeing Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss) again is enough for her to go on living, despite how miserable she's convinced her life has become and will remain.

In the world of theater, Hedda is one of the great roles—the equivalent of Hamlet, essentially, to which women actors aspire. As interpreted by DaCosta and Thompson, it's plain to see why, because here's a character whose tragic richness is hinted at through her history and between the lines. She's mostly influenced by her father, a recently deceased general, and DaCosta adds the detail that Hedda is the military man's illegitimate child, treated as well as the man would treat her in this society at this time but still perceived with hostility and disgust, as we learn from some of the guests, from certain members of that society.

Hedda has a lot to prove, in other words, and has spent most of her life with anger and resentment, even threatening to burn the hair of a classmate in secondary school. We learn that from the classmate herself. She's Thea (Imogen Poots), the woman who informed Hedda of Eileen's intentions to come to the party. Thea is also Eileen's co-author of a celebrated book that was recently published, as well as the newly sober—for now, at least—academic's lover. When it becomes clear that Eileen is also in competition for the professorship that seemed George's for the taking, it's a perfect storm for Hedda's jealousy, envy, desire for a life that might actually and finally satisfy her, and need to assert some control over everything and everyone around her.

That's the basic setup for what becomes a complex tapestry of what lies beneath the mores, graces, and politeness of this seemingly prim and proper society. DaCosta, cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, and editor Jacob Schulsinger keep the intrigue, betrayals, and revelations flowing with dynamic camerawork and pointed cuts to Hedda, as her "whims" are piqued by some real or unintentional slight against her (Hildur Guðnadóttir's score punctuates those moments with eerie, rhythmic breaths and disembodied voices, as if Hedda's mind panics and calls out for her to act). As the gossip and booze flood through the guests and the house, whatever inhibitions these ostensibly fine folks may hold dear fade, and tragedy seems inevitable.

The thrills of the film are to witness Thompson's meticulously tuned performance (Hoss is also noteworthy as the woman who almost seems as if she can't help herself from becoming Hedda's target), the way DaCosta orchestrates the staging and camerawork to make the material feel grandly theatrical and uncomfortably intimate, and how the screenplay balances its plotting, psychological insights, and cutting view of this insulated little society. Hedda is as faithful as it needs to be to the source material, but this adaptation becomes its own exciting and vibrant drama.

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