Sense and Sensibility (2026)
A caterpillar crawls along Marianne Dashwood’s finger while her older sister broods a few steps away, and in its opening scene Georgia Oakley tells you what sort of Sense and Sensibility this will be. No chandeliers, no lawns arranged for admiration. The camera sits low among cattails, spiders beaded with dew, and lily pads, and the Dashwoods look like people who inhabit a landscape rather than pose in front of it.
The story keeps its shape. Forced to leave the family estate with their widowed mother, Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) settle with young Margaret (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) in a humble cottage at Barton (played by the real Ditsworthy Warren House), where love and money arrive tangled together. Elinor reasons her way through everything; Marianne feels her way through all of it. The reserved Edward (George MacKay) draws one sister, the dashing Willoughby (Frank Dillane) the other. Diana Reid’s screenplay mostly stays out of Austen’s way, which strikes me as the right instinct, and Oakley (whose previous feature was Blue Jean) keeps the historical pressure on.
Edgar-Jones gives Elinor a steely restraint that cracks in the right places, and her chemistry with MacKay is immediate; I believed in them before either said anything useful. Edgar-Jones also looks the right age for Elinor, and Oakley makes use of it. Creed-Miles is the one I kept watching. She commits to Marianne’s feelings completely, and she is sharp-tongued and funny well before she becomes frightening. The script lets her down a little, because Marianne announces her passions so often that the speeches start to wear. Dillane makes Willoughby charming in a way that explains everything and excuses nothing, and he is riveting enough that you understand, against your better judgement, why Marianne falls for him.
The 1995 film, with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet in the roles, is the obvious comparison, and I won’t pretend these performances match theirs for sheer magnetism. The look doesn’t always help either. Stretches of Arnaud Potier’s photography turn drab, which I take to be a choice of mud and weather over fantasy; even a chosen drabness can wear thin across 132 minutes. Against that, there is a physical, weathered quality to the film that makes the longing feel lived in rather than recited.
What the film believes it is about is the two sisters, and I think it earns that claim. Elinor must learn to let feeling in. Marianne must learn that feeling needs a counterweight. The best scenes put them on either side of that gap, with Marianne complaining she can see no proof of love in her sister’s guardedness, and Oakley leaves us in no doubt that the proof is there. The film trusts us to read Elinor’s devotion without being told. The price falls on the men, who get less room than the novel gives them, and Edward in particular has been reworked (the producer, India Flint, has said he is where the film moves furthest from the book) in ways I’m not convinced improve him. I also sense the film leans toward Elinor’s side of the argument, which is one reading of Austen and not the only defensible one.
It is a good adaptation, earthy and well acted, and warm toward both sisters. Austen readers curious about a more earthbound version should find it worth their time, and so should anyone who likes stories where two people argue because they love each other.