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(CIFF Review) HEDDA is Nia DaCosta's Modern Tragedy of Control and Desire

By. Professor Horror 

Playing at the 61st Chicago International Film Festival, HEDDA marks another bold step for writer-director Nia DaCosta. Known for her work on Candyman (2021) and Little Woods, DaCosta has proven her skill at blending social critique with stylish and unsettling atmosphere. She is the perfect director to reimagine Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, a play infamous for its study of repression, manipulation, and feminine rage. While DaCosta keeps some of the deliberate, almost theatrical pacing of Ibsen’s source material, her version also embraces the grandeur and visual excess of big-budget cinema. The film’s lavish sets, precise costuming, and psychological tension create a world that feels stage-bound yet cinematic, intimate yet overwhelming.

 

At the film’s start, we do not yet know what happened, only that something terrible has occurred. Hedda, played by Tessa Thompson, is being interrogated about a shooting, her calm demeanor suggesting a mind teetering between control and collapse. From there, the movie unfolds as it slowly lead to the moment of tragedy. Hedda has recently married George Tesman and is throwing an enormous house party to celebrate their union. The celebration is a Gatsby-level affair with a full staff fussing over every flower, pillow, and spoon to ensure absolute perfection. Yet no amount of polish can conceal the rot beneath the surface. Hedda herself refuses to be fixed. She is unhinged, clever, and cruelly amused by the discomfort of others. Her husband and his friends bore her endlessly, and her only real joy seems to come from shooting her gun off the rooftop, each blast echoing like a release of everything she is not allowed to say. The marriage between Hedda and George feels more like an arrangement than a partnership. George is uptight and consumed by academic ambition, worried about money, loans, and appearances. Hedda, meanwhile, thrives on chaos. Their dynamic is a constant push and pull between order and destruction, performance and honesty. DaCosta captures that tension beautifully, showing how every polished surface and polite exchange conceals an undercurrent of dissatisfaction. The result is a film that feels both glamorous and suffocating, like a perfect home built over a sinkhole.

 

Although Ibsen’s play was written in the 1890s, DaCosta’s adaptation moves the story to 1954. The change is not just cosmetic. It reframes Hedda’s frustration within a post–World War II context, when women who had experienced independence during the war were suddenly expected to retreat back into domestic life. DaCosta’s Hedda embodies that dissonance. She is a woman who has tasted freedom and now feels its absence like an open wound. Her rebellion is not just against her husband but against a world that defines her only through men. Even the title of the film reflects this resistance. Ibsen’s play title refused to use her husband’s name (Hedda Gabler) showing she never accepted her new name. But, DaCosta goes further by erasing Hedda's father’s name as well. This Hedda belongs to no one, and that lack of ownership becomes both her power and her downfall.

 

As the film progresses, Hedda’s manipulations grow more deliberate and dangerous. She becomes fixated on George’s academic rival, Eileen, who is also revealed to be Hedda's former lover. The revelation adds another layer to Hedda’s cruelty and longing. She toys with both Eileen and George, delighting in their insecurities and jealousies. For Hedda, control is the only form of intimacy left. Her power lies in making others unravel, and DaCosta captures this psychological warfare with a delicate precision that feels both seductive and horrifying. The tension builds until every conversation feels like a loaded weapon, and every glance carries the weight of potential ruin.

 

Visually, HEDDA is one of the most stunning films of the year. The mid-century costuming, opulent interiors, and golden-hued cinematography make the film shimmer with elegance, yet DaCosta never lets the audience forget the decay beneath it all. Each act of manipulation and cruelty pulls another thread loose until the party spirals into chaos. What begins as a pristine celebration collapses into a Dionysian feast, complete with spilled wine, shattered glass, and the sound of laughter turning into screams. The film becomes an exploration of human nature itself: the instinct to destroy what we envy and to wound what we cannot possess. By the end, the question remains: does anything truly make Hedda happy? DaCosta’s film does not offer a clear answer. Instead, it suggests that Hedda’s only sense of satisfaction comes from power itself, and the fleeting thrill of control before everything burns. Hedda is not a story of redemption but of inevitability, a portrait of a woman who refuses to be contained and destroys herself in the process. It is both breathtaking and brutal, and a haunting modern retelling.