How many times can you go to the well?

In theatres now it’s interesting because while audiences weren’t really clamouring for yet another Jane Austen adaptation, particularly of her most popular work in Sense and Sensibility but that ends up being when we get a film that ends up being unexpectedly strong thanks to some very strong leading performance.

From Focus Features and Working Title comes an irresistible new take on Jane Austen’s iconic Sense and Sensibility: a charming, witty, and deeply relatable story of love and sisterhood starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles.

While the temptation to keep going back to proven intellectual property to make movies is something as old as the medium itself…it doesn’t always work.  This iteration of Sense and Sensibility manages to shine thanks to it take more of an organic character driven tone rather than having an overt focus on the period and the timeframe.

Coming off of her impressive feature debut; Blue Jean back in 2022, director Georgia Oakley keeps the material in a very organic and grounded way, allowing for the natural colours of the countryside to ring through allowing for a visual tapestry that allows the character work to come through rather than having the production design of recreating the ornateness of the period.  It’s very much a less as more and makes it feel more real rather than having us as an audience feel like we are transported somewhere foreign in a period piece that can occasionally feel cold leaning too hard on production design.  Much in the style of last year’s Hamnet, I can’t remember the last time a Jane Austen adaptation felt so ‘earthy’, and it really works in its favour.

We’ve been seeing Daisy Edgar-Jones in a number of quality roles in the last few years, but it’s here as Elinor Dashwood where she gets to separate herself from the pack as one of the young actors who will be commanding our screens for the next quarter century.  She embodies the independence and practical nature of the character that has endeared her to audience and fans of the written word and on the big screen.  In this film, there’s no doubt that Edgar-Jones is a star that we can’t look away from.  George Mackay as Edward Ferrars matches her note for note and the awkward chemistry between the two draws us in with an uncommon ease that isn’t always apparent in films like this.  Esme Creed-Miles as the outgoing Marianne Dashwood, Caitriona Balfe as the indomitable Mrs. Dashwood and the always entertaining Fiona Shaw as Mrs. Jennings all do great work in support of Edgar-Jones and Mackay in their love story.

With this adaptation of Sense and Sensibility I honestly can’t remember the last time that one of these kinds of films felt so invested in the individuals rather than say the back drop of the action of the narrative.  This is probably the guy in me talking, but this is the first time where I actually felt invested in the characters collective happiness rather than just following the proceedings to a happy ending.  There’s a difference and as much as I appreciate Ang Lee and Emma Thompson’s adaptation from 31 years ago, I actually like this one better because it felt like it put the person over the period.