Georgia Oakley's Sense and Sensibility arrives with a clear thesis: strip the rom-com gloss from Austen's novel and find the financial anxiety underneath. It works, up to a point. The Dashwood sisters' predicament — inheriting nothing, dependent on the goodwill of men, socially penalised for appearing to want money — lands harder in this register than it did in 1995. Diana Reid's script sharpens something Lee and Thompson left soft: Mrs Dashwood's insistence on retreating to Devon is explicitly about not letting Elinor look like a gold-digger. That's a real clarification, not just a reframe. Daisy Edgar-Jones carries the film's emotional centre with the same quality she brought to Normal People — a face that registers internal weather without broadcasting it. Her Elinor is controlled without being cold. Esmé Creed-Miles as Marianne is harder to read, and the film never quite solves the problem of making Marianne's romantic intensity feel earned rather than performed. The two of them look, as the review bluntly notes, like flatmates rather than sisters, which is either an inspired choice or an unintentional side effect of the naturalistic casting — the film doesn't decide. Frank Dillane's Willoughby is the kind of villain who wears his smirk like a second waistcoat, and Eliot Sumner's gender-bent Mr Palmer is genuinely interesting — a small casting choice that costs nothing and gains something. But Herbert Nordrum as Colonel Brandon is a problem the film cannot solve. Nordrum is legitimately excellent in The Worst Person in the World, but transplanted here he reads as inert rather than repressed. The heavy facial hair doesn't help. Brandon needs to communicate a specific kind of contained devotion; Nordrum communicates largely nothing. Fiona Shaw as Mrs Jennings is the film's voltage source. She arrives, says things that are slightly too true to be polite, and charges every scene she enters. Elizabeth Spriggs played the same role in 1995 as loveable comic relief; Shaw plays her as someone who actually understands everyone in the room, which is more interesting and more Austen. The cumulative effect is a film that is correct about what Austen's novel is about and imperfect in how it assembles its cast to serve that argument. The cloudy Devon light and the stripped-back mood read as genuine aesthetic choices, not budget constraints. But one central miscasting doesn't become a texture — it remains a miscasting. Oakley's direction holds its nerve; the screenplay is sharper than it gets credit for; and Edgar-Jones keeps the whole thing from drifting into grey. There's no shame in this sitting below the 1995 film in the rankings. The Lee-Thompson version had Emma Thompson writing her own adaptation of a book she clearly loved at bone level, and Alan Rickman being Alan Rickman. Setting the bar there is unfair. The fairer comparison is: does this version justify its existence, say something the other versions didn't, and give you a reason to spend two hours with it? The answer, mostly, is yes — with one asterisk wearing a large beard.
