Drew Burnett Gregory is back at TIFF, reporting with queer movie reviews from one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. Follow along for her coverage of the best in LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond.

In Lucas Hnath’s Tony Award-winning 2017 play A Doll’s House, Part 2, the playwright suggests we’ve moved beyond the feminism of Ibsen’s heroine. The ways in which A Doll’s House questioned society have been settled, and now we can instead question the casualties of a woman choosing herself. It was a bold statement — especially, if I may, from a man — that seemed to resonate with audiences who longed to chastise the solipsism of female empowerment in a decade when feminism had gone mainstream. Well, it’s a new decade, and filmmaker Nia DaCosta is here with an even bolder statement using another of Ibsen’s heroines. If Hnath suggested we’d moved beyond the feminism of the 19th century playwright, DaCosta underlines its relevance. Where A Doll’s House, Part 2 negated, DaCosta’s Hedda deepens.

This new vision of Hedda Gabler is moved to 1950s England, queered, and compressed to one raucous night. Tessa Thompson plays Hedda Tesman née Gabler, a woman recently married to a man she doesn’t love. They’ve returned from their honeymoon and are set to host a party at their glamorous new estate. Hedda and her husband, George (Tom Bateman), have the appearance of wealth with no actual money, something that could change if George can secure an available professorship. Alas, the role seems to be going to George’s academic rival Eileen (Nina Hoss), Eilert in the original text, a bold thinker and Hedda’s former lover. Eileen has recently taken up with with Hedda’s schoolmate Thea (Imogen Poots) who has reformed Eileen away from booze and helped her focus on a new book they’ve co-written that aims to reveal the hidden truths of human sexuality. Throw in George’s friend, Judge Brack (Nicholas Pinnock), who is also taken with Hedda, party guests with their own dramas, and Hedda’s penchant for guns, and the night becomes an inevitable disaster.

The film has all the discordance of a theatrical revival that stretches the edges of its famous text. DaCosta wisely leans into these imperfections, allowing her story to exist in a space between the setting of the original text, the setting of the film, and the present. The gorgeous costumes and production design may be true to the 1950s, but the dialogue and the way people of various identities are treated remain more fluid. At first jarring, it eventually underlines the ways sexism, racism, and homophobia persist into the 2020s. Even the dreamy cinematography from Sean Bobbitt pulls the film from the past, letting the lens flare in a way that strips any period piece distance.

While most contemporary work that diversifies the past softens history, DaCosta uses the same techniques to harden the present. The decision to gender-swap Eilert isn’t just an excuse to cast Nina Hoss and add a veneer of queerness. It completely changes the relationship between Hedda and her former lover in a way that feels grounded in lesbian betrayal. For all her talk of freedom, Hedda has chosen a conventional life. She has married a man — a white man — in an attempt to get closer to privilege, a closeness that has merely left her isolated and depressed. DaCosta’s Hedda is not a bisexual woman who fell in love with a man; she is a bisexual woman who has chosen heteronormativity at the expense of her true feelings. All of the chaos she wreaks is the real Hedda trying to escape. The more her husband tries to control her and the more she lets herself be controlled by expectation, the more she wants to destroy.

The whole cast is wonderful, but Thompson and Hoss are the film’s core. In the original text, Hedda’s former lover feels like a pawn. Here, she feels like a tragedy. Each scene between Thompson and Hoss is heavy with grief and longing. In a world without hierarchies, without stifled emotions, the two women might have thrived. The decision to have Eileen’s research focus on kink and perversion is a brilliant touch. Her manuscript becomes a totem of her alternate life with Hedda, a plea for a future unencumbered by bigotries and conventions.

Rather than condemn or excuse Hedda through a modern gaze, the film celebrates her while introducing a foil for her flaws. Hedda and Eileen are both imperfect and yet their admirable qualities combined create a note of optimism absent from a work that is usually tragic. Instead of tearing down an Ibsen heroine, DaCosta creates another. It’s a generous and complicated act that feels like a confession. Reinterpreting a text can be as revealing as writing something new and this interpretation feels loaded with its writer/director’s place in Hollywood. The first Black woman to have a number one film at the box office, the first Black woman to direct a Marvel movie, DaCosta has made a film about the compromises women — Black women, queer women, all women — are asked to make to work within systems of power. All of the delicious chaos by Hedda and Eileen is really a cry of anger, a cry of sadness, a cry for recognition and freedom.

Hedda is a stellar adaptation of a great play, a riotous queer romance, and, most importantly, a plea from an artist for a different future. Much has changed from 1891 to the 1950s to today, but not enough. No, certainly not enough.

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