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Nia DaCosta's HEDDA to Premiere at TIFF Before Streaming on Prime Video
If you're as movie-addicted as I am, with pearl-clutching for period dramas and sleepless nights over A24 teaser promos, then clear your schedule and drain your emotional warehouse. Nia DaCosta's HEDDA, the incendiary modern adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, premieres at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). And trust us, it's coming for your throat.
After TIFF, the emotional quake hits Prime Video worldwide on October 29, 2025, in time for a psychologically chilling Halloween.
HEDDA is not a film. It's a state of mind. It's a silk malfunction. It's women's fury encased in designer stilettos and ready to blow. And darling, it's going to be fabulous.
You might know DaCosta from Candyman (2021) or as the first Black woman to direct a Marvel movie (The Marvels). With HEDDA, DaCosta is making history. She's writing, directing, and producing, and she's bringing Ibsen's 1891 play back down to electrifying contemporaneity and unstoppable sensuality.
This is not your high school English class's Hedda Gabler. This is a woman hemmed in by the most cinematic possible means.
We can leave it at that and applaud the cast to their feet because Tessa Thompson is Hedda. That's all. That's the news.
Thompson, also the director, is a depth-feeling actress. Despite Sylvie's Love for Passing, she's been built for an acting role like that. In HEDDA, she's described as having a raw, feverish, downright enchanting performance. Hedda, as played by Tessa, is a woman suffocating beneath suffocating social conformity and gendered constraint, dressing herself in elegance as a disguise until she no longer does, from early word about individuals involved in the play.
She's ably supported and encouraged by a cast who are literally glowing on paper.
Imogen Poots is a catastrophe at all times in the best way
Tom Bateman, whose cheekbones will need to have their own agent
Nicholas Pinnock, with brooding screen intensity
Nina Hoss, the German force of nature, you saw blow your mind in TÁR
Devouring an entire long, lingerable night, HEDDA is full of that slow-build-key tension we snack on like gourmet popcorn. Bottled-up passion? Check. Old flame rekindled to burn again everywhere? Check. Mind games, manipulation, and women on the brink? Triple check.
The trailer for 'A Whirlpool of Manipulation, Passion, and Betrayal' has my shrink prepped with the Kleenex, ahead of time.
If you're a true cinephile, you already know a movie's as iconic as its department heads are. And HEDDA's got creds.
Score by Hildur Guðnadóttir (Joker, Chernobyl) has you feeling every string section personally like it's an insult.
Cinematography by Sean Bobbitt, BSC (12 Years a Slave, Widows) promises shadows, close-ups, and emotional destruction.
Cutting by Jacob Schulsinger (The Worst Person in the World) promises no beat will be missed.
Cara Brower's Production Design (The Menu) is recreated into the interiors, more lavish than Hedda herself.
Lindsay Pugh's Costume Design (The Crown) is shouting period-present elegance, crying 'rich, miserable, and emotionally fraying.'
TIFF is not a film festival. It is an awards-season barometer. That HEDDA is opening there speaks volumes about one thing loudly and clearly. Amazon and Plan B can smell Oscars.
And I vow, DaCosta and Thompson walk into the Dolby Theatre next year with their names on ballot cards.
October 29, 2025. That's when HEDDA premieres on Prime Video, and that's when your group chat becomes a raging debate about ethics, feminism, and whether Hedda is a villain or a victim. (She's both. That's the point.)
Light a candle. Have a glass of red wine. Get ready to untangle.
It's not a film. It's an audit.
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