Daisy Edgar-Jones – Movie Musings

Very much a response to the last adaptation, full of strange moments that never feel like Austen

Sense and Sensibility (2026)

Director: Georgie Oakley

Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones (Elinor Dashwood), Esmé Creed-Miles (Marianne Dashwood), Caitriona Balfe (Mrs Dashwood), Bodhi Rae Breathnach (Margaret Dashwood), Frank Dillane (John Willoughby), Herbert Nordrum (Colonel Brandon), George MacKay (Edward Ferrars), Fiona Shaw (Mrs Jennings), Stacy Martin (Fanny Dashwood), Tom Brooke (John Dashwood), Turlough Convery (Sir John Middleton), Chloe Pirrie (Lady Middleton)

Shortly before this I rewatched the Emma Thompson/Ang Lee Sense and Sensibility, which despite being over thirty years old is still fresh as a daisy. It’s one of two iconic 1995 adaptations of Jane Austen novels – the other, of course, being the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice – that so completely nail Austen, all other adaptations pretty much feel superfluous. I went into this hoping I’d feel different after watching Georgia Oakley’s film. And No, I very much did not feel different.

You know how it goes. Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) are the Dashwood sisters: one is sensible (introduced dutifully doing household accounts) the other is sensibility (introduced whirling in the country, running through the wheat fields like a wildfire Theresa May). With their mother (Catriona Balfe) and younger sister Margaret (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), they are turfed out of their family home after the death of their father – but not until Elinor has fallen in love with Edward Ferrars (George Mackay). Arriving in the country, Marianne in turn falls in love with dashing Willoughby (Frank Dillane), ignoring stoic Colonel Brandon (Herbert Nordrum).

Let’s be fair and talk about what works. Much of the first half-hour, focusing on the gentle courtship between Elinor and Edward, is well done. Daisy Edgar-Jones, gifted at showing deep emotions under a reserved exterior, is perfect casting as Elinor. She has great chemistry with the equally good George Mackay. The sisterly bond between Elinor and Marianne is front-and-centre and feels completely real. Narrative changes actually help make this strong, such as their continued sharing of a bedroom (unlike the novel, here Edward accepts taking one of the sister’s Norwood bedrooms and their pokey cottage also requires them to share a bed). Austen’s best lines still work and there are fine supporting performances, particularly Chloe Pirrie as an awkward Lady Middleton incapable of talking about anything except the weather.

That’s the good. After the first half hour however, despite flashes of decency, the wheels wobble and eventually fall off. What’s most striking about the mess this eventually becomes, is how (despite having some of the right trimmings) it begins to feel nothing like Austen at all. Austen’s work is very much set in a world of restrictions and carefully unexpressed feelings, leading to misapprehensions and misunderstandings. Not a problem here: in this film pretty much everyone utters exactly what they are feeling all the bloody time, as if they were in Wuthering Heights. The clumsy telegraphing of these subtle feelings is like getting walloped by a Bronte collected works every few minutes.

On top of not feeling like Austen, it doesn’t look like Austen. Look I get they wanted a different palette from Ang Lee’s film, full of sun and brightness. But the muddy browns and gloomy overcast skies feels like you watching it through a muddy puddle. It makes the film feel more like it’s a Thomas Hardy adaptation. That would actually match the wild country yokel feeling they’ve given Devonshire, as well as the Tess of the d’Urbervilles like bubbling, openly expressed emotions present all the time. It’s a response, obviously, to the 1995 film but it also doesn’t really feel like Austen at all.

That sense of running scared of its illustrious predecessor also seems to be the reason behind an increasingly bizarre series of changes. Marianne saved by Willoughby from tripping up on a beach rather than tumbling in the rain? Edward Ferrars rocking up to confess the details of his engagement to Elinor rather than Lucy Steele? This change, presumably because they were worried otherwise a modern audience might think Edward was playing fast-and-loose with Elinor, is staggeringly nonsensical. Even within this adaptation, they do not remotely feel like people who would openly state their emotions as they do here. The backstory is made ludicrously complex: apparently Edward’s mother ordered him to marry Lucy Steele, then changed her mind when Lucy lost her money, but Edward stuck with it. It’s an attempt to make Edward not seem remotely cavalier – rather undermined when he later tells Elinor he will ditch Lucy on a word from her (what a prince!). It’s not quite the worst change.

Marianne’s reaction to Willoughby’s jilting bubbles less with shattered idealism and more like a teenager who’s been stood up on prom night (bizarrely Elinor ends up defending him). She doesn’t seem heartbroken, more furious – as if the film was worried that she would otherwise look weak. She then walks through the rain to scream at his house, before coughing and being pronounced at death’s door, before an immediate recovery … Yes this is as much a mess as it sounds. The absolute pits are hit when Brandon and Willoughby fight a spontaneous pistol duel (did Brandon bring them with him on the off-chance?) in front of a Dashwood audience, that’s so left-field that the audience in the cinema I saw it in laughed out loud.

The crude clumsiness of the dialogue, with all those subtle Austen feelings dumped on the table like the dead pheasants Sir john Middleton keeps giving the Dashwoods, is echoed in many of the performances. Creed-Miles can’t find the poetic romanticism in Marianne and has zero chemistry with Dillane. Perhaps not a surprise, since Dillane plays Willoughby’s caddishness from the start (how could anyone not notices this guy’s a rotter?). Their romance is captured in a thinly sketched scenes which don’t ring true either romantically or in period (gossiping on the stairs at a party or lying together in the fields). The real low though is Herbert Nordrum, who clearly read Brandon’s stoic reservedness as “he is boring”, and gives us the most tedious, charisma-free Austen hero ever, someone so dull even Austen would probably rather spend time with the weaselly Willoughby.

The mess just gets worse and worse. The film doesn’t even attempt to re-stage the actual romantic confessions and ending of the book (and the 1995 film), ending where it started but with a different Dashwood galumphing through the fields. But then they couldn’t do the original ending in any case, because these characters have stated their love for each other twice already. It’s also strangely appropriate to end it with Elinor and Edward virtually screaming their emotions at each other on a moor. After all, everyone has been doing the same thing with every thought crossing their mind during the film.

Look I know it had to be different. But this is frequently too far, as if the team working on it would rather have made either Wuthering Heights (but damn, Emerald Fennell got there first) or Far from the Madding Crowd (but damn, Austen is better box office). It frankly doesn’t feel anything like the source and doesn’t do anything entertaining enough to make up for that. Every adaptation is a response to adaptations before. The only response to this, is to watch the 1995 one again.

It won’t blow away, but theres something reassuringly old-fashioned about Twisters

Director: Lee Isaac Chung

Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones (Kate Carter), Glen Powell (Tyler Owens), Anthony Ramos (Javi), Brandon Perea (Boone), Maura Tierney (Cathy Carter), Harry Hadden-Paton (Ben), Sasha Lane (Lily), Daryl McCormack (Jeb), Kiernan Shipka (Addy), Nik Dodani (Praveen), David Corenswet (Scott)

Twisters is perhaps one of the oddest pieces of IP rebooting (as we call it these days) in years: a sideways sequel to a 1996 box-office hit that virtually no one has thought about once since it was in the cinema thirty years ago. Twisters hardly brings in a new breath of air for 2024 compared to what worked at the box-office in 1996: in fact in many ways it’s as predictable as that film was. But yet it gets away with it, because there is an old-fashioned simplicity about it, a pure ‘just wanna entertain you’ vibe throughout, combined with the fact it creates a small group of likeable characters we care about, played by winning performers. Rather like Top Gun: Maverick it takes the ideas that people liked from the first film but delivers them far more effectively with much more charm.

Meteorologist and instinctive twister spotter Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is one of the few survivors of a failed scientific experiment to use a compound foam to reduce the power of tornados, with the deceased including her boyfriend Jeb (Daryl McCormack). Five years later she is called back into the field by her old colleague Javi (Anthony Ramos) who needs her help to test his new tornado radar-scanning technology company. In Oklahoma with Javi’s team, Kate faces her fears, finds that the impact of the storms is leaving a heavy burden on the community and falls into a flirtation with rock-and-roll meteorologist and YouTuber Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) whose cowboy exterior hides his heart of gold.

All this blows itself up into highly entertaining stuff, told with an old-fashioned sense of fun by Lee Isaac Chung. It’s actually a relief to find a modern blockbuster just focused on an entertaining, character-led piece of popcorn fun, rather than blowing pop-culture references, set-ups for future films and homages to hits from yesteryear, straight into your eyes. Twisters never reinvents any wheels at all, but it’s several degrees better than the forgotten film its riffing on and you’ll end up being surprisingly invested in it.

A big part of that is the charming and hugely likeable performances from its two leads. Edgar-Jones is very good at this sort of tough-edged exterior hiding inner-vulnerabilities (the team on Twisters must clearly have binged through Normal People during lockdown like the rest of us). Powell – who is having a moment and then-some – is also an absolute pro at cocksure types like this with unexpected layers. There is a sort of It Happened One Night opposites-attract screwball comedy between these two, who take each other at first for a naïve city-girl and a brainless cowboy only to find (would you believe it!) that first impressions are not always the right impressions.

However, this sort of rom-com, relationship-led stuff is exactly what makes Twisters entertaining and makes you care for it. After all, as Twister showed us, once you’ve seen wind related special effects pile on, you’ve kind of seen them all, it’s just a question of degree. Twisters front-and-centres not so much the gusty action, but the characters at the heart of it. Impressive as Chung’s staging of the blowing away of cars and the ripping up of buildings is, it works because we care about the people at cowering beneath the gale.

That’s because Twisters is told with an old-fashioned heart. There is nothing in it that really surprises you: Daryl McCormack’s prologue boyfriend has ‘doomed’ written all over him the moment he speaks and the only thing that you’ll really puzzle over is how long the post-prologue time-jump will be. Although it’s character and plot developments are well handled and endearingly delivered, there are all unsurprising. Would you believe Kate and Tyler find they have much in common? That Tyler’s blow-hard cowboy storm-chasers turn out to all have Hearts of Gold? That Javi’s loaded, Stetson-wearing tycoon sponsor is a ruthless modern-day Crassus, using the weather forecasts to snap up devastated land for tuppence? It’s just like we can be pretty certain that the twister-diluting experiment that Kate is working on in the film’s opening will come storming back in Act Five.

You could pretty much scribble down all possible plot developments over the course of the film after watching the first twenty minutes, but somehow it doesn’t really matter. Even though everything in this is completely and utterly safe and straight-forward, it’s told with such professionalism and such a sense of fun, it hardly matters. Everything in Twisters is focused on just entertaining you and not forcing you to worry or get stressed about things. Perhaps that’s why the film shies away from the questions asked around why the storms are getting worse (let’s not bring something really depressing like climate change into a breezy opposites-attract thrill ride). To balance that it does more-or-less avoid the storms making moral judgements on who gets killed off in its blustery assaults, unlike so many other disaster movies.

Twisters offers nothing really original or unique, but everything in it seems to come from the heart, like Chung wanted to make the sort of unfussy, well-meaning entertainment vehicles he watched in his youth, when it was all about sitting back, munching popcorn and leaving with a grin on your face that a film just entertained you. And at a time when the cinema seems to be full of easter-egg stuffed, self-satisfied, franchise-building bait there is an awful lot to be said for that.