150 Word Review: 'Hedda' (2025)
Over heels
Director/writer Nia DaCosta’s divinely indecent adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1881 play Hedda Gabler is set during a wild party circa the 1950s. And I mean a real drunken barnburner that spins out of control. At the center of the melee is Tessa Thompson’s confident, calculating Hedda, a well‑bred but bored newlywed in danger of going broke. DeCosta respects Ibsen’s social critiques while filtering this story of class and ambition through a queer lens. She gender‑swaps some roles, but Hedda still strikes a defiant feminist pose: she is fiercely independent, right or wrong.
Tom Bateman is George, Hedda’s husband, an ambitious, debt‑ridden professor forced to compete for a plum job against a former lover of Hedda, Nina Hoss. Chekhov’s gun stars as Hedda’s father’s antique pistol. Thompson carries the movie on her back. She schemes, quips, and manipulates her well-heeled, poorly behaved guests. Ibsen wrote a tragedy; DaCosta lightens it up.
Brilliant take on how DaCosta lightens Ibsen's tragedy without losing the bite. The choice to keep Hedda's defiance intact while gender-swapping roles feels like it amplifies the original claustrophobia rather than just modernizing it. I watched a staged version few years back where they tried to make Hedda more sympathetic and it totally killed the tension, but filtering thru a queer lens actually sounds like it could deepen that sense of someone trapped by societal expecations. Dose Thompson really pull off the scheming without making Hedda too unlikeable?
Must watch this. I had plans to remake Hedda Gabbler and set it on the internet, remake The Master Builder as a #MeToo story, remake The Wild Duck about pronouns, and so on