'Hedda' knows how to throw a party

Director Nia DaCosta brings Henrik Ibsen’s mean girl to vibrant life in period drama.

- AMY NICHOLSON FILM CRITIC

PARISA TAGHIZADEH Prime

TESSA THOMPSON stars as Hedda in Prime Video's remake, alongside Tom Bateman as her husband.

“What a horrible story! What a hideous play!” a theater critic for the Daily Telegraph lamented after the London premiere of “Hedda Gabler” in 1891. Victorian audiences were repelled by Henrik Ibsen's fatally attractive newlywed who appears to have it all — the fancy house, the doting husband — only to be violently bored.

But writer-director Nia DaCosta —_(“Candyman,” “The Marvels”) and her star Tessa Thompson understand Hedda down to the pretty poison in her molecules. Their rollicking redo, set from dusk to hangover at a drunken bacchanal, is vibrant and viciously alive. With apologies to Ibsen's ghost, DaCosta’s tweaks have sharpened its rage. I don’t think that long-dead critic would like this “Hedda” any better. I think it’s divine.

Thompson's Hedda is a clever, __status-conscious snot raised to believe that her sole purpose is to be a rich man's wife. With no hobbies or career and no interest in motherhood, her only creative outlets are squandering money and machinating the success of her milquetoast husband, middlebrow academic George (Tom Bateman), who has such a flimsy hold on his bride that his last name might as well be attached to hers with Scotch tape. (It’s Tesman and it’s pointedly rarely used.) Hedda doesn’t love George. In fact, she seems to think he’s a whiny little worm. But she’s dead-set on securing him a promotion to afford her expensive tastes.