A house of dynamite: "Hedda"

Where Guillermo del Toro gives us Frankenstein as we know it, with Hedda the writer-director Nia DaCosta offers Ibsen's Hedda Gabler as you likely won't have seen it before: all under the one roof, and in some movie intensification of real time. Now we're in 1950s England, watching a society soiree we know will go awry, because a prologue has already shown our poised heroine (Tessa Thompson) submitting to police interrogation. On the night in question, the stakes are perilously high, as this Hedda's straitlaced husband George (Tom Bateman) is keen to point out: among the invitees are a High Court judge (Nicholas Pinnock), who has one eye on his bombshell hostess, and Professor Greenwood (Finbar Lynch), chancellor of a university at which Hedda hopes to find gainful employment. (It's as much job interview as dinner party, because wining and dining is how this stratum of society works.) But there will be unexpected arrivals, too: a justifiably nervy young thing (Imogen Poots, at her most Poots-ish), who turns up bearing a) the only copy of her academic manuscript and b) a warning that Hedda's old flame, a professional provocateuse by the name of Eileen Lovborg, is in town and on the warpath. When the old flame is revealed as being embodied by the ever-lofty Nina Hoss, here leading with her embonpoint, we are confirmed in our suspicions there will be serious trouble, if not mortal danger, ahead. Among the Gablers' antique furnishings is a heirloom revolver straight out of Chekhov, brandished in jest in the first reel and thereafter passed hither and thither; even without it, this country house could scarcely seem more like a tinderbox.

Both of this week's streamer-backed productions are united in demonstrating a desire to work within lavish period settings: even after the summer's so-called Grand Finale, the Downton effect continues to hold sway over the West's creative industries. Yet where del Toro goes for the classical approach - straight-ahead, often prettifying - DaCosta strives constantly to rough her source material up, to find new angles on the action, to generally agitate. One immediate advantage to being an outsider within the country-house genre: she's not so easily seduced by the usual period accoutrements. The formal dinnerwear and flowing gowns are soon thrown off, revealing more basic instincts, and throughout Hedda, DaCosta proves intensely alert to the ugliness her characters have been trying to dress up: the jockeying for positions of power (or to hold onto power), the varyingly normalised and casual prejudice ("she's duskier than I expected"), the horrible compromises these people have made, and will make, to grasp the big brass ring. DaCosta's studio-compromised Candyman redo - another old tale given a fresh lick of paint, before being unduly kicked to the kerb - revealed the emergence of an artist's eye: it was always strikingly composed, even if the storytelling wobbled here and there. Here, working with the experienced DoP Sean Bobbitt, the filmmaker adorns her frames with exactly that shade of yellow where gilded warmth meets the onset of jaundice, and greens that give off bare nausea, as though the mussels served up for an entrée had gone bad on everybody. It's an example of a filmmaker moving into an inherently conservative genre with the aim to unsettle - rhythms, stomachs, assumptions - tucked into her waistband like a loaded gun.

In the lead, Thompson is far from the regally assured Hedda theatregoers might have in their heads - Brit ears will only hear a performer reaching for the accent - but that uncertainty, too, meshes with the authorial intention: it's as if DaCosta is extending the dissonance of Hildur Guðnadóttir's score into the performances, looking for off notes from her wildly disparate cast rather than the harmonies most ensemble directors seek, and honing in, as Ibsen did, on those points where the power imbalances the text set in play become unignorable. This is a film where Nina Hoss comes to stare down Imogen Poots, which instinctively seems a terribly unfair fight - but then Poots, ragged and tearful, holds her own in this company, even Hoss's Eileen proves more vulnerable than she first appears, and Thompson gives us a Hedda who's scrabbled her way to somewhere near the top only to realise the effort has left her exposed and an even bigger target besides. The radical rethink extends to an open ending that allows all of these internal tensions to spill over into the present - DaCosta's own assertion that we still haven't got a grip on any of this. (Observing that manuscript being torn from a woman's hands and scattered to the wind, she may well have been thinking of the interference her last project suffered.) Full disclosure: I was a bit sceptical when I heard Danny Boyle had handed the next instalment of his ...Later franchise to DaCosta, especially given the previous film's very British denouement. But Hedda confirms this filmmaker as not just adaptable and adventurous, but more attuned than most to the decadence and decay of collapsing societies. A boon for horror franchises, this Hallowe'en: she's also got teeth and claws.

Hedda is now streaming via Prime Video.