Tags: blog, film, drama, 2025, recommended
Author: KickingK
Date: Saturday November 22nd, 2025
Why So Serious?
A free-spirited, fiercely independent black woman with a sexually promiscuous and lesbian past, with a wealthy husband in a loveless marriage in patriarchal 1950’s England. And when we first meet her at the start of the film she’s contemplating suicide.
That character description of Hedda Gabler, magnificently played by Tessa Thompson, gives you an inkling as to what you’re about to watch.
The film very, very quickly disabuses you of that notion. This is absolutely not that kind of film. And Hedda is not that character.
Movie villains tend to exist in one of three categories: The plotting Machiavellian, the agent of chaos who just wants to ‘watch the world burn’ or the opportunist for whom events spiral out of control.
As the film progresses over the course of a single party, held at their preposterous country mansion, Hedda somehow manages to be all three.
Her character is complicated and not at all straightforward, but still nasty, self destructive, unlikeable and utterly magnetic. A human wrecking ball you can't take your eyes off.
None of the other characters come out of this particularly well either. Only Thea comes away with any sympathy and she’s a complete drip.
The film does an excellent job of portraying the straight-laced, stiff upper lipped puritanism of the fifties and how it melts at first contact with the upper classes attitudes towards, well, literally anything that will get in the way of them getting what they want. This film’s opinion of rich people is as black as a hat and revels in giving them enough rope.
The pleasure in the film is in feeling the revulsion for their actions whilst also enjoying the electric tingle at the shock of it all.
The final shot of the film is one of the best super villain inception moments you’ll ever see. Nia da Costa’s previous work for Marvel implies this is entirely deliberate.
