“What are you up to?” someone asks our leading lady in a plot so thick with cattiness, intrigue and betrayal that it’s often hard to work out anyone’s true motivations. You might ask the same question of director Nia DaCosta, following three very modern genre movies with an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s late 19th century stage classic, a period drama at that. But despite a certain staginess, and a tendency for the plot to suddenly stop to make way for the acting, Hedda is actually a genuine attempt to mine something new from the old text, a compelling fusion of Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn and Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things.
When we first meet Hedda (Tessa Thompson), she is being questioned by the police about a shooting, of which she has only a dim memory (“It was a party, after all”). Hedda’s smirk speaks volumes as the film flashes back to that fateful night. We’re in a stately home in England, sometime in the 1950s, and Hedda Tesman, née Gabler, is throwing a ball. As we are about to learn, Hedda, a general’s daughter with a wild past, has recently tied the knot with George (Tom Bateman), an academic. George is fishing for a major teaching post but is disconcerted to find that, as well as the board of professors he is trying to impress, Hedda has also invited his main rival for the job.
So far, so much the play, but DaCosta has a trick up her sleeve: George’s nemesis is now female, a woman named Eileen (Nina Hoss), Hedda’s ex-lover. Eileen’s imminent arrival is made even more dramatic when a younger woman named Thea (Imogen Poots) turns up at Hedda’s door in a state of distress. Thea recently broke up with Eileen, but the two have written a book together, making it hard for Thea to make a clean break. But when Eileen makes her entrance, she no longer seems to be the same woman we’ve heard about: sober and, like Hedda, she has married well (“You’ve never cured of your vices, you resist them,” she explains). Eileen, hoping to use the party for her own advantage, has brought with her the manuscript of her book — which Hedda knows is the only copy, and she wants it.
Perhaps understanding that a woman stealing a book from a bag isn’t exactly Mission: Impossible stuff, DaCosta reframes the story as a kind of Wildean black comedy, with lashings of ribald innuendo (notably the eyebrows that raised when George innocently declares that his wife “loves eating out”). In that respect, Thompson is perfect, playing Hedda as a stealth socialite ninja who’s always one step ahead of the competition. “Before you were domesticated, you were like fire,” a guest tells her, and, despite Hedda’s surface layer of gowns and finery, Thompson’s layered work means it does seem possible.
Generously, Thompson’s performance leaves room for two more, the first being Poots’ low-key but impressive Thea, a mousy woman who arrives wet and bedraggled, causing Hedda to dress her in her own clothes (a gesture that has more than one meaning for Hedda, who’s still in love with Eileen). It’s Hoss, however, that sets fire to the screen. As the supposedly “reformed” Eileen, Hoss really gets to tear the roof off, spectacularly falling off the wagon and humiliating herself more and more throughout the evening.
Despite the film’s ominous introduction, the ending doesn’t quite live up to all the foreshadowing — to outdo Chekhov, there are at least four instances of guns being waved — but DaCosta perhaps isn’t so committed to the plot as she is to the people. Unusually for a party movie, the revelry seems quite real, and makes a very intriguing backdrop to the story, becoming more and more debauched as Hedda gets deeper and deeper in the weeds with her plot against Eileen and, it even seems, the world. Salient use of Roxy Music’s “Love Is the Drug” rounds things off nicely, a wryly ironic comment on everything we’ve just seen.
Title: Hedda
Festival: Toronto (Special Presentations)
Director: Nia DaCosta
Screenwriter: Nia DaCosta, from the play by Henrik Ibsen
Cast: Tessa Thompson, Nina Hoss, Imogen Poots, Nicholas Pinnock, Tom Bateman
Sales agent: Amazon MGM Studios
Running time: 1 hr 47 mins