Emma. (2020)

Autumn de Wilde's adaptation of Jane Austen arrives dressed in pastel, ribboned within an inch of its life, and confident in its own charms. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Emma Woodhouse as a young woman who has never been told no and cannot quite process the experience when it happens. Eleanor Catton's screenplay keeps Austen's wit intact, and the film's pleasures are real: Bill Nighy's querulous Mr Woodhouse, the nosebleed, the picnic at Box Hill. What we have here is a handsome, well-mannered period romance that knows exactly what it is and never pretends otherwise.

On the matter of contemporary social consciousness, the ledger is thin. The film observes the marriage economy of Regency England, where a woman's future is a transaction, but it observes it as texture, not as an indictment of wealth or class. No character is raced in any meaningful sense, and the cast is uniformly white British; Taylor-Joy's Argentine heritage is nowhere foregrounded, and no effort was made to widen the room. There is no queer presence, no environmental anxiety, no interest in bodies outside the conventional period ideal, and no neurodivergent interiority on offer. The feminist claim is modest and largely inherited: a headstrong heroine, a woman directing, a woman writing, all of it Austen's own furniture rearranged with taste.

The film also declines to lecture. Emma's cruelty to Miss Bates is punished by Knightley in a single quiet scene, and the lesson lands because it is dramatized, not announced. Nobody turns to the camera to explain what we should feel. This is a comedy of manners that trusts its audience, and it earns its small moral reckoning the old-fashioned way. For a viewer hunting for the anxieties of the present decade, the search will be brief and the results disappointing. For everyone else, it is a pleasant two hours in the country.