DaCosta and Thompson go to work on Ibsen

Cinema | November 18th, 2025

By Greg Carlson

In “Hedda,” Nia DaCosta’s bold adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s celebrated 1891 play, the filmmaker reunites with longtime collaborator Tessa Thompson, who starred in DaCosta’s directorial debut “Little Woods” (screened, among other places, in the Fargo Film Festival). DaCosta makes several audacious alterations to the original text, switching the setting from Kristiania (Oslo) to 1950s England. The writer-director also centralizes a queer reading, swapping the gender of Ibsen’s Eilert Lövborg. Now Eileen Lövborg, and played by a fiercely good Nina Hoss, the implicit becomes explicit in a stormy and broken lesbian relationship that triggers tragedy.

In Ibsen, the alcohol-soaked party during which Lövborg’s manuscript comes into George Tesman’s possession happens offstage, but DaCosta’s masterstroke is to build almost the entirety of the action around an increasingly feverish soiree held at the grand (and unaffordable) home of the newly married Tesman and Hedda. The manuscript, co-written by Eileen and current lover Thea Clifton (Imogen Poots), continues to function as a perfect MacGuffin, representing the direct threat to George’s more permanent employment as a university professor and to Hedda’s iron-willed sense of self. Additionally, the swirling, roiling waves of the evening blowout buoy the comings and goings of key supporting characters, including Judge Roland Brack (Nicholas Pinnock), who leverages his own power in an increasingly coercive clandestine affair with Hedda.

DaCosta primarily filmed “Hedda” at Flintham Hall in Nottinghamshire, and the opulent estate is every inch as captivating as the Northamptonshire's Drayton House in Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn” or the Debenham House in West Kensington that Joseph Losey used in “Secret Ceremony.” Alongside the vision of production designer Cara Brower, the film’s art direction, set decoration and costume design combine as a formidable force. For fans and admirers of filmmaking that incorporates a stunning location as a character in its own right, “Hedda” offers nonstop visual riches. Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt’s roaming camera never strays too far from Hedda and her manipulative scheming.

Ibsen’s famous creation is an opportunity for any performer to deliver a tour-de-force, and Thompson joins a venerated shortlist of Hedda Gabler’s finest interpreters. DaCosta imagines this particular Hedda as a complex antiheroine and Thompson fearlessly embraces her with no limit to the pettiness, cruelty, ruthlessness and rancor that erupt from the ashes of a frustrated and broken heart. Like the most satisfying Heddas, Thompson knows exactly how to communicate the complaint that she needs to be recognized with a singular identity independent of being her father’s daughter or her husband’s wife.

Despite key limitations corresponding to the privilege of its author and the time and place in which it was originally conceived, “Hedda Gabler” has been a sturdy site of feminist interpretation and reinterpretation. The play has led academics to ponder everything from suicide and unfulfilled desire to the rejection of patriarchal ideology to “female masculinity” and gender performativity to Hedda’s suitability for motherhood and on and on. One theory that has refused to go away is the suggestion that Hedda is afraid of sex. In an excellent 2016 essay by Jenny Björklund, the scholar rejects that reductive reading. DaCosta and Thompson, rather emphatically, do as well. Their Hedda is as hot as a pistol.

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