With Hedda, writer-director Nia DaCosta scrambles the gender and sexuality of Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 play Hedda Gabler, but what struck me most about the adaptation is the way she has pushed the title character, played by Tessa Thompson, toward something demon-possessed, if not demonic.
Perhaps this shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering DaCosta’s filmography includes Candyman, her 2021 remake of the 1992 horror film. (Her other directorial efforts are the MCU entry The Marvels and Little Woods, the latter of which also features Thompson.) And so, as the newly married Hedda Gabler presides over a lavish party–all a ploy to land her husband a prestigious academic position, which becomes complicated by the appearance of his rival for the job, who also happens to be Hedda’s former lover—the soundtrack rumbles with sacrificial drums and exhales with insinuating sighs. Hedda’s manipulations, meanwhile, are framed as those of a sulfurous tempter: the promise of sexual favors here, the encouragement to drink deeply from bourbon there, the offering of a gun to someone considering suicide (DaCosta strikingly frames the exchange before a roaring fireplace).
As Hedda, Thompson mostly relishes in the evil deliciousness of the part, though I did appreciate the way she allows tears to timidly appear after Hedda’s most heinous acts of sabotage or betrayal (this suggests possession more than anything else). As part of the gender-swapping, Nina Hoss plays the rival professor and Hedda’s former lover. Hoss (so riveting in Christian Petzold’s Phoenix) gives the strongest performance, arriving at the party with a goddess-like superiority that Hedda tragically chips away at as the night proceeds. Though not without a riveting fight.
(11/1/2025)
