Tag: Imogen Poots

Hedda (2025)

An imaginative Ibsen reworking that works brilliantly in some places but doesn’t make enough of an impact

Director: Nia DaCosta

Cast: Tessa Thompson (Hedda Gabler), Nina Hoss (Eileen Lovborg), Imogen Poots (Thea Clifton), Tom Bateman (George Tesman), Nicholas Pinnock (Judge Roland Brack), Finbar Lynch (Professor Greenwood), Mirren Mack (Tabita Greenwood), Jamael Westman (David), Saffron Hocking (Jane Ji), Kathryn Hunter (Bertie)

Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is pretty much the closest you get to a female Hamlet: complex, multi-layered, torn between envy and vulnerability, selfishness and frustrated yearning, independence and stupefying domesticity. y Nia DaCosta’s intriguing adaptation mixes in some fascinating ideas but never quite lands with the force and energy it needs to really impact the audience.

DaCosta moves the action from nineteenth-century Sweden to a house party in 1950s England, in the palatial home of debt-ridden academic George Tesman (Tom Bateman) and his austerely cool wife Hedda Gabler (Tessa Thompson). George is making a desperate pitch for a professorship to repay his debts to sinister Judge Brack (Nicholas Pinnock), who seems more interested in getting payment-in-kind from Hedda.

Hedda affects a distanced, disinterested manner – until the arrival of her old flame Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss), with her new partner Thea (Imogen Poots) in tow. Eileen and Thea have written a revelatory new book (currently only one draft copy exists) that places Eileen in the driving seat for gaining George’s professorship. Shaken, Hedda instigates a campaign to destroy Eileen, based either on desperation, deep jealousy or self-loathing, that plays out during the increasingly debauched, night-long party.

There are so many good ideas in Hedda, it’s disappointing that the final product is so curiously uninvolving. DaCosta’s film, sharply directed with a lovely ‘bright young things’ flair mixed with some Du Maurier gothic menace, looks fabulous and confidently mixes intense character study with illicit sex, dramatic gunshots and desperate fisticuffs. The transplanting of Ibsen’s original to a new setting is surprisingly smooth and the idea to compress the whole story (which takes place over a couple of days in the original) to a single night does at points give it a propulsive energy, especially as characters’ inhibitions increasingly fracture under the influence of drink.

The best innovation in Hedda is translating Hedda’s old lover Eilert Lovborg into Eileen. This switch opens up a rich vein of possibilities which the film embraces in its most successful moments. Hedda has turned her back on her own sexuality to claim a place in society: a sexuality Eileen flaunts in front of her male peers, her costuming an intriguing fusing of styles. Hedda’s envy of Thea taking her place now has the double tinge of knowing that Thea – who has left her family and become more of an intellectual partner than Hedda ever was – is also a braver, more committed person than Hedda.

It also blows open even further the cosy, drawing-room, closed-shop nature of this world, where George and the peers he is so desperate to appeal to withdraw to private rooms for clubbable drinks and smutty gossip about girls. Professor Greenwood (a reptilian Finbar Lynch) drags around a trophy wife (Mirren Mack) whom he treats with indifference right up until exploding in fury at her cuckolding him. Judge Brack (a vilely smooth Nicholas Pinnock) alternates between patronising women and looming like a predator over them. George stands out as a genuinely decent man here, respectful of Eileen and uncomfortable with overt masculinity, but even he still sees Hedda’s place as tending to hearth and home rather than a true equal.

This theme of sexual politics comes roaring into life thanks to Nina Hoss’ magnetically charismatic performance, embodying Eileen with a swaggering, intellectual confidence that hides a deeper fragility that’s only just keeping her on the wagon. A wagon she spectacularly falls off (due to Hedda’s prodding) in an attempt to show she can be one of the boys, culminating in an attempt to barnstormingly dominate a room, drunkenly unaware (despite George’s efforts to warn her) that her lake-water soaked shirt is clinging suggestively to her body to the slathering delight of her male audience.

Hoss’ performance is brilliant, collapsing from assured distance, via frantic nervous energy, into wild-eyed desperate vulnerability. Charting an opposite course is Imogen Poots, very good indeed as Thea who feels like one of life’s doormats (not helped by the hideously unflattering dress Hedda insists she wears) but who reveals deep strength of character and determination. The film’s finest sequences revolve around these two, who offer the film’s most intriguing and best-explored modernisation. Credit also to Nicholas Pinnock’s marvellously predatory Judge Brack and Tom Bateman’s decent-but-timid George, a man so sheltered that raucous sex jokes fly obliviously over his head.

It’s unfortunate that the film stumbles more with its portrayal of Hedda. I’m not sure Hedda manages to really grasp the conflicting depths of its lead character. Tessa Thompson gives a committed performance, but it’s hard not to feel the English accent vocally constrains her (why not just let her use her own?) and the film rarely gives her a chance to fully explore the character’s depths. We should feel there is an explosive cauldron of feelings under Hedda’s surface, but only rarely (if at all) does the film ever manage to pierce it, rarely getting to grasp with the character’s conflicting impulses, settling more for an Iago-like drive to destroy, based on jealousy.

Hedda also misses a slight trick, I feel, by not playing up Hedda’s potential outsider nature in 1950s England via her race. (There is a throwaway comment on her ‘dusky skin’, but in a film of colour-blind casting, with the most powerful character played by a Black actor, it doesn’t land.) And making Hedda a bohemian contemptuous of high society doesn’t sit well with her obsession with her father’s status, or her desire to control her high surroundings.

It contributes to a film that never quite manages to come to life as it should, because we never quite understand our lead character, whose coldness and distance extends to us as well as the characters. In a film awash with good ideas, it’s a fatal flaw, and Hedda never quite catches fire emotionally or thematically as it should, because Hedda herself is curiously underserved and under-explored.

PS: Years ago, I played George Tesman in a production of Hedda Gabler where Tom Bateman played Eilert Loveborg. He was (of course!) brilliant, and it was a personal delight to see him as Tesman here (as well as a little odd, I won’t lie!), just one of many perfectly judged performances he’s given in his career.

The Father (2020)

Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins excel in Florian Zeller’s sublime The Father

Director: Florian Zeller

Cast: Anthony Hopkins (Anthony), Olivia Colman (Anne), Rufus Sewell (Paul), Imogen Poots (Laura), Olivia Williams (The Woman), Mark Gatiss (The Man)

Is there any worse nightmare than the thought of losing your mind? Worse of all, to lose your mind in stages: to be aware, in every moment, that things are not as they should be, that people and places no longer seem to fit your memory of them. That you can walk into a room and completely forget why or meet someone close to you and have no a clue who they are. It’s an unimaginable condition to go through – and the subject of Florian Zeller’s exceptional adaptation of his award-winning play, The Father.

Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) is a retired engineer slowly succumbing to dementia. Events are increasingly confusing to him. Is he living in his own flat, or is he living with his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman)? Is Anne moving to France or not? Is she married to Paul (Rufus Sewell) or not? Where is his other daughter who looks so like a woman who may-or-may-not be his new carer, Laura (Imogen Poots)? From moment-to-moment Anthony struggles with confusion, rage and fear as the world constantly fails to coalesce into a meaningful picture, but instead remains a fragmented jumble.

That’s the brilliance behind Zeller’s adaptation of his own award-winning play. It captures the perspective of the world for those suffering from dementia in a way no film has done before. The play’s timeline is disjointed in an almost Nolan-esque way, and it’s not clear whether we are watching ‘real’ events’ or if all of these events are memories of Anthony’s which dementia has shuffled, reordered and recast. Either way, the film constantly refuses to allow you any grounding from scene-to-scene, and refuses to present clear answers (although you can infer much).

Even the sets betray us. From to scene to scene the apartment is redressed, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes in jarringly different ways. The same fundamental layout sees every room constantly redesigned. Sometimes it could be Anthony’s apartment. Sometimes Anne’s apartment. Sometimes a mix of the two. Sometimes it’s a hospital, in others a retirement home. Often it might be a combination of one or more of these locations all at once. The style of decoration is inconsistent, the furniture changes, pictures move, even the colours of bedsheets change. Every single scene disorientates us: it’s only a movie for us, but for Anthony this is his life.

In fact, if The Father has a filmic influence, interestingly it’s a horror-film. Anthony is a man trapped in a situation where he knows everything is wrong, but can never fully understand why, or get people to listen to him. Often the camera catches discomfort and fear on Hopkins’ face, and it’s clear he neither knows where he is or, in many cases, who the people with him are. But for fear of not being believed or a sense of powerlessness, he’s too proud and scared to ask. It taps into the powerlessness of horror films, where you are relentlessly chased by a force outside your control: in The Father that force is life, which has become for Anthony a disturbing kaleidoscope where everything makes sense to everyone except him.

Of course, a large part of this is sold by Anthony Hopkins Oscar-winning lead performance. Hopkins delivers to an astonishing degree: this might just be the greatest performance of his career. Although we see flashes of ‘the true Anthony’ – his wit, playfulness and intelligence – Hopkins deftly and subtly demonstrates the wildly varying mood swings dementia brings. At times he’s paranoid, defensive and even aggressive. At others he’s stunningly vulnerable and scared – he has two breakdown scenes of such heart-breaking vulnerability and boyish fear, they are tough to watch.

The film opens with Anne telling Anthony she’ll be leaving for Paris, and Hopkins’ face collapses into a crumpled, puffy, scared-little-boy face while he plaintively asks what will happen to him. Anthony fixates on things that give him any sense of control: he is obsessed with his watch, hiding it and continuously searching for it. He will dredge up a fact from the distant past to ‘prove’ he has not lost his memory. He snaps angrily when he feels he is being talked down to. His resentment expresses itself in viciously cruel verbal assaults on Anne, labelling her a disappointment, failure and his least favourite child. Then a few scenes later he’ll squeeze her shoulder and quietly and lovingly thank her for everything she has done for him. All of this is delivered by Hopkins with no grand-standing, but with a hugely affecting truthfulness. It’s an astonishingly good performance.

Every scene carefully demonstrates time and again Anthony’s fear and vulnerability. Actors are even replaced by other actors in several scenes. In Anne’s second appearance she is played by Olivia Williams. In a beautiful piece of subtle acting by both Hopkins and Williams, it’s clear Anthony doesn’t recognise Anne and she realises this but decides not to say anything. Anne’s husband (or boyfriend – Anthony remains unclear, so at times so do we) Paul (as he’s called most of the time) is mostly played by Rufus Sewell, but sometimes by Mark Gatiss. Paul is the closest the film has to an antagonist, although much of that is filtered through Anthony’s confused perception and, in any case, Paul is right that Anthony’s condition is making it too difficult for him to remain at home.

And we can see his point. Although each scene more-or-less makes sense within itself, the complete film is like looking at a jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces upside down and no picture, and then being asked to assemble it. In one particularly brilliant dinner scene, the film starts with Anthony witnessing a conversation between Paul and Anne, then loops through the scene and ends with Anthony witnessing exactly the same conversation again. The film is a deliberately, brilliantly, opaque tableau that defies easy meaning.

In all, The Father is a quite unique and brilliant film, that translates a theatrical piece into something highly cinematic. Hopkins is breath-taking, but Colman is also superb as Anne, in a part tailor-made for her ready empathy and easy emotionalism. Zeller’s direction is astonishingly confident and dynamic for a first-timer and the film slots you into the world of a dementia sufferer with an alarming immediacy. A superb film.

Centurion (2010)

Michael Fassbender surveys the devastation that is Centurion

Director: Neil Marshall

Cast: Michael Fassbender (Quintus Dias), Olga Kurylenko (Etain), Dominic West (General Titus Flavius Virilus), Liam Cunningham (Brick), David Morrissey (Bothos), JJ Feild (Thax), Noel Clarke (Macros), Riz Ahmed (Tarak), Dimitri Leonidas (Leonidas), Ulrich Thomsen (Gorlacon), Imogen Poots (Arianne), Paul Freeman (Gnaeus Julius Agricola), Rachael Stirling (Drusilla), Less Ross (Septus)

It’s an old fable: the “missing” Roman legion, the 9^thLegion that allegedly marched to Scotland around 120 AD. We don’t know what happened (if anything) but it usually gets tied into Hadrian’s decision to build his famous wall. Anyway, Neil Marshall’s film tries to plug the gap, with the Legion eradicated on an ill-judged expedition north to settle affairs there once for all. A “ragtag bunch” of survivors (all of whom match expected character tropes) have to run over hostile countryside, led by surviving senior officer Centurion Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender) to get back to safety and Roman lines.

It’s a Neil Marshall film, so you can expect blood-letting aplenty and high-octane action on a budget. And you more or less get it, mixed with his love for accelerator-hitting chases and against-the-odds action. It’s entertaining enough, but its main problem is that it feels a little too by-the-numbers, as if all the thought about how to make it original and exciting went straight into the look and style of the film – all drained out colours and serious claret – and none at all into storytelling or character.

You sort of end up caring for the characters in a functional way – largely because they are all such familiar types – but their personalities seem to have been designed entirely around the various deaths that have been invented for them. So the enthusiastic meet unjust ends, the likeable fall to cruel chance, the world-weary give their lives for one more stand, the selfish meet justice. At the end, the characters you would basically expect to stumble to the finish line do. It’s a film that lacks any uniqueness.

In fact, what gives the characters life is the professional character actors playing them, all of whom can do what they are doing here standing on their heads and look like they were largely there with an eye on pleasant after-shooting hours in a series of local pubs. It’s hard otherwise to think what attracted them to these cardboard cut-outs and pretty familiar structure.

Not that there is anything wrong with what Marshall does with his film here – it’s a lot of fun when stuff is happening, it’s just that nothing feels like it carries enough weight or originality to survive in the memory. Everything is fine but nothing is really inspired. There is very little sense of Ancient Rome or any other place. The Romans are basically squaddies, an idea that sounds interesting until you remember turning period warriors into versions of modern soldiers is hardly new, while the Brits chasing them are woad-covered psycho stereotypes.

So while it passes the time, Centurion does nothing special with it. It feels like a wasted opportunity – that with a cast this good and a decent premise, plus a nice little historical mystery to pin it onto in order to give it depth, Marshall could have come up with something that was more than the sum of its parts rather than less. Perhaps it needed more time with its ragtag group so they actually became characters rather than plot devices. Perhaps it needed to take more of a rest from its constant chasing to allow quieter moments of reflection and character. Perhaps it’s just a chase film that is never quite compelling enough to make you overlook these things. Either way, Centurion isn’t an all-conquering empire of film.