“What are you up to?” someone asks our leading lady in a plot so thick with cattiness, intrigue and betrayal that it’s often hard to work out anyone’s true motivations. You might ask the same question of director Nia DaCosta , following three very modern genre movies with an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s late 19th century stage classic, a period drama at that. But despite a certain staginess, and a tendency for the plot to suddenly stop to make way for the acting, Hedda is actually a genuine attempt to mine something new from the old text, a compelling fusion of Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn and Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things .

When we first meet Hedda ( Tessa Thompson ), she is being questioned by the police about a shooting, of which she has only a dim memory (“It was a par

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