Hedda: Fire in a Gilded Cage

 

Image: Amazon MGM

Some characters don’t age. They wait.

Lingering in the dark corners of literature, sharpening their edges for the right moment to return. In Hedda, director Nia DaCosta exhumes one of theatre’s most dangerous women and lets her breathe in modern air — and the result is suffocating in the best way.

At the centre of it all is Tessa Thompson, who doesn’t so much play Hedda as detonate her.

Thompson has always possessed a cool, coiled intensity; visible in everything from indie dramas to franchise blockbusters, but here she weaponizes stillness. Her Hedda is not hysterical. She is calculating. Bored. Starved. Every glance feels like a chess move, every silence, a threat.

DaCosta’s direction is all sharp lines and psychological claustrophobia. The camera lingers in rooms that feel too small for the ambition trapped inside them. Light pours in like interrogation. The production design, all polished surfaces and curated minimalism, becomes a gilded cage. This is not a period museum piece. It feels contemporary, almost corporate. Power here isn’t just social, it’s aesthetic.

What makes this adaptation sing (and sting) is its refusal to soften Hedda. There’s no desperate attempt to sand down her cruelty into something palatable. Thompson leans into the character’s volatility: the thrill she feels at manipulating those around her, the flicker of contempt behind a polite smile, the existential dread that simmers beneath her immaculate composure.

DaCosta understands that Hedda’s true antagonist isn’t a person; it’s confinement. Marriage, expectation, respectability, they press in on her like walls inching closer. The film treats domestic space like a battlefield. Conversations become duels. A drawing room becomes an execution chamber.

The supporting cast orbits Thompson with precision, each performance calibrated to highlight Hedda’s emotional temperature. Yet it’s Thompson’s magnetic chill that dominates. She doesn’t beg for sympathy. She dares you to judge her.

Tessa Thompdon as Hedda - Image: Amazon MGM

There are echoes of DaCosta’s earlier work, that same interest in power structures, in how systems quietly suffocate individuals while pretending to protect them. But Hedda feels more intimate, more venomous. It’s a character study wrapped in psychological horror.

And make no mistake, this is horror. Not the jump-scare variety, but the slow, creeping terror of watching someone unravel because the world has offered them no meaningful outlet for their brilliance or rage. Hedda isn’t mad. She’s caged. The tragedy is that when she finally exerts control, it’s through destruction.

The film’s pacing is deliberate, almost theatrical, but DaCosta uses cinematic language to amplify what the stage could only suggest. Close-ups become confessionals. Silence becomes accusation. The score hums beneath scenes like a tightening wire.

What lingers after the credits isn’t shock, it’s discomfort. Thompson’s Hedda forces you to confront a dangerous question: what happens when a woman too intelligent for her circumstances is told to shrink herself into decorum?

Hedda doesn’t offer easy answers. It offers tension. It offers fire contained in glass. 

With DaCosta’s razor-sharp direction and Thompson’s mesmerizing control, this adaptation feels less like a revival and more like a warning, about repression, about ego, about the quiet violence of expectation.

Some characters don’t age.

They wait.

And when they return, they burn the house down.

Catch this incendiary avant-garde reimagining now streaming on Prime Video