Sense and Sensibility (2026)

Someone Get These People a Group Chat - Sense and Sensibility review by griggs

This was my first Sense and Sensibility in any form, so no Emma Thompson-shaped yardstick was waiting in the wings. Other Austen adaptations had taught me that someone would make a catastrophic romantic decision. Reader, several did.

Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles hold Georgia Oakley’s version together. Edgar-Jones’s Elinor swallows feelings before they can become sentences, while Creed-Miles’s Marianne falls in love as though nobody warned her how this ends. George MacKay’s Edward is awkward and constitutionally incapable of saying the useful thing at the useful moment. Fiona Shaw gives every raised eyebrow the attention it deserves.

It looks terrific, all muddy paths, windswept hair and natural light. Nobody seems parked beside an antique chair for the production still.

But 132 minutes is a lot of yearning in fields when I’m only mildly invested in who eventually marries whom. Half the plot depends on people withholding basic information until it causes maximum inconvenience, most of which could have been avoided if Regency England had a family WhatsApp group. I watched the heartbreak from roughly the distance Elinor keeps everyone at.

Lovely to meet the Dashwoods. I’m less convinced I need to call on them again.