Hedda Lets Tessa Thompson Break Your Heart While She's Breaking Everyone Else's
Nia DaCosta's queer reimagining of Ibsen finds its fire in the space between Tessa Thompson's cruelty and Nina Hoss's ache.
By MIGUEL MATEO | OCTOBER 31, 2025
Nina Hoss does not so much enter Hedda as arrive already wounded by it. As Eileen Lovborg, the former lover whose reappearance detonates one airless night of a party, Hoss plays a woman who has spent years building a fragile sobriety and an even more fragile sense of self, and who watches both come apart in real time under Hedda's gaze. It is a performance built on restraint that keeps threatening to give way, and when it finally does, in the scene where Eileen realizes what has happened to the manuscript she has poured herself into, Hoss makes grief look like a physical injury. If the Academy has any sense left, her name belongs on that list in the spring.
But the film belongs to Thompson, and to the particular difficulty of what DaCosta asks her to do. Hedda is a woman who manipulates every person in her orbit for reasons that are never fully legible, not even to her, and Thompson plays that opacity as a kind of trapped violence rather than mystery for its own sake. The party sequence, where she works the room with a smile that never quite reaches anywhere real, is the film's most purely enjoyable stretch of cruelty. She is having fun destroying people. And yet.
That "and yet" is where DaCosta's central choice pays off. By making Eileen the woman Hedda actually loved rather than a man she once fancied, the film turns Hedda's marriage into something more specific than a wrong life. It becomes conformity chosen on purpose, a retreat into a shape the world would accept over a life with the one person who ever saw her clearly. Thompson plays that history like a wound she has trained herself not to touch, in glances that last half a second too long, in the way her hands find the pistols her father left her like they are the only inheritance that ever made sense to her. The cruelty she inflicts on Eileen throughout the film reads differently once you understand it as the closest thing Hedda has to intimacy, the only way she still knows how to reach across a distance she put there herself.
By the time the film reaches its final act, watching Hedda choose destruction over exposure feels less like villainy resolving into punishment and more like a woman finally telling the truth about herself, at the worst possible cost, decades after the moment she first lied about it. It is a genuinely upsetting thing to watch a monster you have been rooting against become the person in the film you understand best.
The tension between Thompson and Hoss is the whole engine of the movie, and DaCosta shoots them like two people who know exactly how to hurt each other because they once knew each other completely, and once loved each other more honestly than either has been allowed to since.
It is also impossible not to think, watching Thompson here, about Passing, and about the fact that neither she nor Ruth Negga received a single nomination for two performances that should still be taught in acting classes. That omission remains one of the more indefensible snubs of the last several years. This time, the Academy has a chance to get it right.
Rating: ★★★★ out of ★★★★★