Film: Sense and Sensibility (2026)

Not really a film review: Sense and Sensibility (Georgia Oakley, 2026)

Mrs kdan and I went to the cinema this week for the first time since the animated film Wall-E came out, which was around 2008. The film which persuaded us out of our customary domestic evening torpor was the latest adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, directed by Georgia Oakley. I'd like to hope that everyone knows it is based on the novel by Jane Austen, written in the 1790s and first published in 1811, but perhaps I shouldn't make such assumptions. If it's new to you then Wikipedia can bring you up to speed:

Sense and Sensibility

It's not the first S&S on film and I imagine if anyone reading this has seen another version it would probably be Ang Lee's 1995 film starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet. More recently there was the BBC series broadcast in 2008.

Don't compare the film with the book

I read or re-read all 6 of Jane Austen's main novels, some of her shorter works, about half her published letters and Claire Tomalin's biography in 2025 because it was the 250th anniversary of her birth in December of that year and I wanted to mark the occasion. The reason her work has remained almost continuously in print for two centuries and has so many readers even now isn't a simple thing to summarise. It's certainly fair to say a big part of what makes her a literary genius is her mastery of free indirect discourse, which she didn't exactly invent, but she was one of the earliest and most talented users of what has since become the standard form of prose for novels. Here's a definition of free indirect discourse (or style) from the Jane Austen's House Museum:

This is a literary style that allows the narrator’s voice to share with us the words, thoughts or feelings of the characters, without telling us that this is what they are doing. This means that the character’s thoughts or words slip into the third-person narrative, subtly shifting the perspective from that of the narrator to that of the character. It’s almost as though the narrator is the character for a moment, but they’re not – they’re still the narrator. Importantly, the speech or thought is not attributed to the character (for example with a ‘she thought’ or ‘he imagined’), so the reader must pick up on clues in the text to understand that these are the thoughts of the character, not the narrator

If you are trying to create a film version of a 120,000 word novel written in that way then you have to make some compromises. The omniscient narrator isn't there to let you look into characters' heads and hear what they are thinking and then slip back out again, so you have to do that job with dialogue. This means you may need to create dialogue which doesn't exist in the book, and you may also need to remove or modify other pieces of dialogue which aren't essential, so you can fit the whole thing into two hours while remaining comprehensible.

The compromises continue with concessions you have to make to a modern audience which doesn't have the same cultural frame of reference as the original readership. The best adaptations adopt a light touch with this, explaining for example that property can't be inherited by daughters, only by sons, without necessarily going into all of the variations on male preference primogeniture which existed. In summary, the film has to stand as a creative endeavour in its own right and which makes sense to people who didn't even know Sense and Sensibility is a book or who Jane Austen was, while not outraging people who read her complete works on continuous rotation.

Things I didn't like

Not much, to be honest:

• Balls and dancing played a big part in Austen's life (read her excitement about going to dances in her letters - they were hugely important to her, and to most young people of her class who had limited opportunities for socialising with members of the opposite sex). The dance scenes in Sense and Sensibility are a little jarring - at the end of the 18th century dancing at occasions like that meant, essentially, English country dancing to folk tunes. Couples at this time would not be holding each other like in a waltz, and although this was pre-Regency and they certainly weren't prim Victorians, they probably wouldn't have been madly whirling around like they do in this film. Perhaps the choreography is intended to reflect the excitement of the occasion for a modern audience, or Marianne's mental state, but I think the modernity of it was out of place

• The developing relationship between Marianne and Willoughby is skated over too quickly. It is supposed to be based on (among other things) a shared love of poetry and music, they are supposed to have memorised the same poems and to delight in discovering this, but all we get is the impression of Marianne being swept off her feet in a matter of minutes by the first smug, ingratiating rake who crosses her path. Never mind the book, just look at Kate Winslet and Greg Wise in the Ang Lee version for how to handle this better

• I'm not sure about the way the director has changed how Elinor learns of Edward Ferrars' engagement to Lucy Steele, from Lucy herself but then (and unlike in the book until much later) from Edward too. Her character (sense to Marianne's sensibility) means that she would not dream of revealing this or her feelings about it to anyone and certainly not to Edward. Instead she is supposed to brood and suffer with the information nearly until the end. At first I thought it bizarre that Edward comes and tells her about the engagement himself as early in the film as he does, but on reflection I wonder if the director wanted to highlight Edward's goodness in honouring the engagement, even though it leads to his family disinheriting him

Things I did like

• The lighting and photography are beautiful, interiors look realistically 18th century and are not over-lit. The dinner scenes at Sir John Middleton's house could have been painted by William Hogarth, there's a sense of provincial seediness, the cottage on the Middleton estate to which the Dashwoods move with their mother has the air of a long-abandoned cow shed. All of this combines to underline the significant fall in status which they have suffered

• Locations in Dorset, Devon and a number of other places around the south of England are very well chosen. Exterior scenes in Dorset and Devon look stunning and are probably much the same now as they were in the 1790s

• Amongst the cast, Fiona Shaw as Mrs Jennings steals every scene she is in. Sir John himself is like a stock character from Shakespeare, a Falstaff perhaps or Toby Belch, and he and Mrs Jennings are played to perfection with strong west-country accents. Of the Dashwood sisters, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esme Creed-Miles as Elinor and Marianne do a good enough job, but Bodhi Rae Breathnach as Margaret stands out as slightly other-worldly, her striking freckles and pixie-like looks giving a sense of the wild and untamed

• The music, by Roger Goula, is lovely. The soundtrack album is on Spotify, if you have that. The closing credits music made my daughter weep when she went to see it

In conclusion

I like the Ang Lee adaptation, but this new version might become my favourite, mostly because of the way it looks and the way in which it convinces you that you might be getting a glimpse into rural England in the 18th century. I've pre-ordered the DVD and will need to watch it a couple more times before I'm sure.

Email: kdan01 [at] posteo [dot] net

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