Two women refuse a martini at Hedda Tesman’s party. Thea does not drink; neither does Eileen Lövborg. Hedda lets Thea’s answer stand. Eileen’s is another matter. An English professor has just shown interest in Eileen’s new book, and she may soon be competing with Hedda’s husband for a university post. Hedda suggests that men who can advance her career will never respect a woman who cannot drink with them. A few minutes later, Eileen takes the glass.
The unequal weight of those answers gives Nia DaCosta’s Hedda (2025) its sharpest account of power. Eileen’s answer was clear. Hedda makes it expensive. It hardly matters whether the professor really looked at Eileen with the contempt Hedda claims to have seen. Eileen has enough reason to fear what he might think. Her professional prospects depend on being accepted by men who can afford to treat a party as an extension of the interview. Hedda knows just where to put pressure.
DaCosta moves Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler from late 19th-century Norway to an English country house in the 1950s. She turns Ibsen’s Eilert Lövborg, a male writer and rival of George Tesman, into Eileen (Nina Hoss), who was once Hedda’s lover. Eileen now loves Thea (Imogen Poots), with whom she has completed the first draft of a book. Tessa Thompson’s Hedda has married George (Tom Bateman), whose hopes of an appointment are tied to the evening’s guests.
The adaptation brings women’s desire, authorship, and financial dependence into the same crowded house. Its question is what a woman can actually do with a refusal when somebody else controls what she stands to lose.
The film treats autonomy as something sustained between people. A clear answer establishes Eileen’s choice; colleagues and lovers determine how costly it will be to keep it. Intimacy belongs to these arrangements of power. Hedda’s touch can be inviting, playful, or attentive. It can also guide another woman toward a choice she has already rejected. Knowing someone closely provides opportunities to care for her and opportunities to hurt her.
Attention becomes care when what the other person wants can change what happens next. Hedda listens closely enough to discover where Eileen is vulnerable, then uses that knowledge to press on. Later, Judge Brack (Nicholas Pinnock) will exploit Hedda’s vulnerabilities through blackmail and force.
A Dress and a Name for the Future
Early in the evening, Hedda helps Thea dress. Hedda handles the clothes and decides what might look right, but Poots gives Thea a small, surprised smile as the fussing begins. She raises her arms for the dress and lets Hedda fasten it behind her. The scene has the pleasure of being attended to, even as Hedda’s questions become intrusive. Thea’s body is not simply a surface upon which Hedda writes. Trying on the dress lets her rehearse entering the party as someone other than the wife she has left behind.
The conversation turns from clothes to money. Asked how she will live, Thea answers that she writes. She helped Eileen with a successful previous book, but her name was absent from its cover. The first draft of their next book is finished, and this time, she says, her name appears beneath Eileen’s. When Hedda assumes she means her married surname, Thea corrects her: Clifton, not Ellison.
Hedda observes that Clifton is still her father’s name. It is a cutting reply, but it catches something real. Changing her surname does not take Thea outside every inherited relation. She can insist, however, on which name will identify her work. Even that modest claim, however, has not yet survived publication.
Thea’s departure from her husband has a similarly unfinished quality. In private, Eileen warns that she will be ruined. Thea answers that she may be a ruined wife without becoming a ruined woman. The book, she hopes, will let them live beyond the verdict of the house and its guests. Eileen is less certain that people will cease judging them; she thinks the judgment might cease to matter. Their difference is small but telling. One woman imagines recognition changing the terms of a life; the other has already learned how persistent contempt can be.
DaCosta says she made Lövborg a woman to give Hedda another counterpart facing related constraints (Autostraddle, 29 October 2025). The change is more than a new configuration of lovers. Ibsen’s Thea helps make Lövborg’s manuscript, and the play treats it as a child they have made together. DaCosta gives Thea a concrete claim to authorship while making Eileen the woman competing for a position in a male profession. The women’s intimate future now depends, in part, on whether their shared intellectual work can be publicly acknowledged.
In the same Autostraddle conversation, Thompson distinguishes the private room available for women’s desire from the economic opportunities that would let them live openly together. The film gives that gap a name on an unpublished manuscript. Hedda has chosen a costly house and a marriage that confer status. She is a mixed-race woman presiding over a predominantly white elite, but she cannot command its money or appointments. Her glamour is real, as is the pleasure she takes in it. It does not, however, free her of the bargains that keep the party going.
Useful Care
Hedda and Eileen have a moment alone in the garden. They stand close, away from the crowd, and their past has room to enter the conversation. Eileen tells her why she cannot take the first drink: once she begins, she may not be able to stop. Hedda hears a boundary spoken by someone she has known intimately. The distance from the guests does not make Eileen safe from her. George calls from the house, and the conversation is drawn back into the evening’s demands.
At the party, Hedda works on another vulnerability. Thea has asked George to look after Eileen at the university. It is an understandable request from someone frightened that Eileen may drink again. It is also a request made to Eileen’s rival without her knowledge. Eileen does not want to enter a room of potential colleagues accompanied, in effect, by a minder. Hedda reveals Thea’s appeal just as Eileen resists the martini. Now the refusal seems to confirm both Hedda’s accusation that she cannot behave as the men do and Thea’s worry that she cannot be trusted on her own.
Thea has reason to be afraid; Eileen has reason to resent being managed. Their conflict exposes a difficulty in care itself: helping someone keep a commitment can become making decisions for her. Hedda exploits that disagreement. The party gives her an audience before which private concern can be made humiliating. She moves the conversation from the glass to the professor, from the professor to Thea’s anxiety, until Eileen drinks to show she needs neither Hedda’s challenge nor Thea’s protection. Hedda has made breaking a chosen commitment feel like an assertion of independence.
This is where the film’s sensuality grows troubling. Later, when Eileen says she loves Thea and is too drunk to face the academics, Hedda straightens her clothes. She smooths Eileen’s collar, cups her face, and kisses her cheek. Eileen bends toward her; the contact briefly restores the ease of people who know one another’s bodies. But Hedda is preparing her to enter the room she says she cannot manage. The tenderness makes the pressure harder to separate from welcome attention. Eileen’s willingness to receive the touch does not make her refusal of the next encounter disappear.
Hedda’s ability to arrange a gown, a collar, or a party is part of her power. Looking splendid and making another woman look splendid can both be pleasures. That pleasure gives the gestures their force. Thea participates in choosing how she will appear; Hedda makes Eileen ready for an encounter she has refused. What matters is how responsive the attention remains once another woman’s wishes interrupt it. Hedda can adjust Eileen’s clothes without adjusting her plan.
What Survives the Fire
The manuscript makes these questions harder to consider than a simple dispute over a drink. Believing the book lost and her relationship with Thea over, Eileen tells Hedda she cannot endure another disgrace. She speaks of making an end of it. Hedda fetches a pistol and tells her, “You can use it now.” Eileen says goodbye to Hedda Gabler. After making sobriety seem cowardly, Hedda supplies a weapon when Eileen can see no future. Her later shock at the shooting suggests she has not fully anticipated what will follow. The weapon she supplied remains her contribution.
Hedda burns the pages Eileen believes lost. George discovers her by the fire and tries to save what he can. He calls the book Eileen’s life’s work. Hedda asks him to think of his own life: if the manuscript survives, Eileen may win the post he wants. Her argument turns destruction into apparent loyalty. She is protecting their marriage, she suggests, by removing the woman who threatens his future.
Yet Thea’s future is on those pages, too. A book bearing her name would not erase the danger of leaving her marriage or guarantee that Eileen would treat her well. It would give her labour a public form that the previous book denied it. Hedda takes away that possibility because she cannot bear what Eileen and Thea might make together and because their success may cost George a job. Desire, jealousy, and financial calculation meet in the same act; none cancels the others.
In Ibsen’s play, Thea calls the lost manuscript a child belonging to her as well as to Lövborg, and Hedda burns it with that image in mind (Hedda Gabler, Act III). DaCosta retains the violence of destroying shared work, then sharpens its question of ownership. Thea is already a writer whose previous contribution went uncredited. The new manuscript is a first draft, not a published triumph. When it burns, what vanishes is both labour already done and the fragile chance of being named for it.
Soon after, Hedda tells George that she is pregnant. She has destroyed the book that Thea and Eileen called their own future; she now invokes the future of her marriage while trying to persuade George that she acted for his happiness. In her cultural critique The Promise of Happiness (2010), scholar Sara Ahmed examines how the desire for another person’s happiness can bind that person to maintaining our own. Hedda makes George’s happiness a claim that seems to override Eileen and Thea’s work. The expected child offers him a family future just as he is confronting what his wife has destroyed. George’s joy does not restore the pages.
Nor is the destruction necessarily final. Thea and George later begin to work out how to reconstruct the book. This is no tidy reward for care: Eileen has been hurt, her relationship with Thea has broken down, and Thea’s credit remains uncertain. Reconstruction takes memory, cooperation, and time. Leaving her husband began Thea’s claim to a different life; keeping her contribution alive now requires help from the man who stood to benefit from its destruction. That dependence complicates any clean division between freedom outside marriage and confinement within it. Her name still has to reach the cover.
The One Who Will Not Listen
Hedda’s own refusals become urgent when Brack comes to her in the library. Earlier, when he pressed her physically, she asserted control over when he could approach her. Now he possesses the gun Eileen used and can expose Hedda’s part in the shooting. He imagines the scandal of the general’s daughter giving a gun to a lesbian in a house she cannot afford. He presents his silence as a favour for which she must pay. When he closes the distance and presses himself against her, the cost is no longer disguised. Hedda says “no” more than once. He continues. She points a pistol at him and pulls the trigger. It clicks empty. She runs outside; he catches her on the lawn and pins her to the ground.
On the lawn, Brack takes the words Hedda had used with him, “I control this,” and turns them into a claim of ownership. The earlier phrase expressed the terms on which she would allow intimacy. He repeats it while preventing her from leaving. His violence is his responsibility; the film gives him no excuse in Hedda’s treatment of Eileen and Thea. Their refusals and hers reveal how a stated limit can be treated as something to overcome, though blackmail and physical force make Brack’s assault a distinct act. Hedda’s suffering does not settle what she owes the women she has harmed.
In Ibsen’s play, Brack’s leverage ends with Hedda shooting herself. DaCosta’s film leaves her alive at the final cut. As voices call from the house, Brack releases her and walks away. She gets up and moves toward the lake, where she puts stones in her coat pockets. She wades into the water. George calls that Eileen has woken up. The camera moves close to Hedda’s face. A smile slowly forms.
DaCosta has said she wanted Hedda and Eileen to have a tomorrow, while leaving open what they might try to do with it (W, 5 November 2025). That intention cannot settle the image. The stones make death a palpable possibility; the news from the house introduces a living Eileen into Hedda’s thoughts again. Earlier, Hedda imagined that Eileen would find somewhere beautiful to die. Now she stands in such a place herself.
Hedda’s smile keeps pleasure in the picture at the moment we might expect only despair. The smile could mark a wish to live; the weighted coat makes that reading difficult to trust. Hedda has survived the night so far, and Eileen is awake. The stones are still in her pockets.