‘Sense and Sensibility’ Review: Georgia Oakley Trades Drawing-Room Polish for Mud, Wind and Rain in a Handsome Austen Adaptation

Thirty-one years after the release of the most successful adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, and 215 years after Jane Austen’s novel was first published, comes a new version of the same canonical work of literature, one that proposes more of an aesthetic and visual modification than a thematic or narrative one. This 2026 Sense and Sensibility does not alter the classic dramatic foundations of Austen’s novel. This is not a case of adding sea creatures, zombies, or even reworking the story to attach a more explicitly feminist, 21st-century perspective to it. The story told here more or less faithfully follows the contours of Austen’s novel, retaining its comic and tragic moments, its familiar dramatic beats and its romantic aura. What Georgia Oakley changes are the forms.

The director of Blue Jean activates the camera in ways that the more classical 1995 adaptation directed by Ang Lee did not, and previous versions even less so. Oakley gives the film an energy, rhythm and cinematography that lend the story a greater sense of realism and rawness. She takes it off the pages of the novel and into the elements: the wind, the rain, the countryside, the sweat, the running and the anguish. This is not a radical reinvention like the ones Andrea Arnold and Emerald Fennell made of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, but rather an attempt to give the story more human flesh and blood, to bring a more contemporary approach to its characters even when the basic contours of the story remain almost exactly as they were.

The story still takes place in late-18th-century England, but the focus is even more squarely placed on the relationship between two sisters who are very different from one another. The older one, Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones), is serious, diligent and responsible; the middle sister, Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles), is pure wild energy and desire worn openly on her sleeve. There is a third, younger sister, Margaret, who runs and jumps around here and there, but not much else. The plot gets underway when their father dies, leaving his three daughters and their mother (Caitríona Balfe) with very little money. To make matters worse, they lose the estate they live in, which passes by inheritance to a timid older half-brother whose wife wants to get rid of them.

Relocated to a small cottage and with very little money — with all the social difficulties that entailed as well — the girls set out in search of husbands and encounter two «prospects» who seem ideal for their respective personalities but come with complications of their own. Elinor falls in love with Edward (George MacKay), her sister-in-law’s brother, but things soon begin to get complicated on that front. Something similar happens shortly afterward to Marianne, who meets and immediately falls for John Willoughby (Frank Dillane), a young man whose intensity and passion are every bit as evident as her own. But things do not go according to plan there either, and along comes Colonel Brandon (Herbert Nordrum), who remains steadfastly in love with her even though her heart belongs to someone else.

Oakley’s changes are mostly found in the details: in the rather modern choreography that seems to dance through the party scenes, in costumes that look more visibly worn by time, in settings and locations that reveal the fierceness of the landscape and, above all, in a dirtier, more earthy visual style that is equally exquisite — there are compositions of almost painterly beauty — but more strongly marked by dust, dirt and the elements. This is where the director’s vision distinguishes itself from the more traditional and/or academic versions of this kind of literary material.

This version of Sense and Sensibility loses quite a bit of the emotional impact of Ang Lee’s film, which did a better job of conveying the pain and anguish of its troubled characters. It is not that Oakley is not after a similar effect, but she does not quite achieve it, perhaps because the actresses playing the sisters do not have the same weight as Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet. Edgar-Jones and Creed-Miles are both very good in their respective roles, but they cannot match the dramatic density their characters had in the earlier adaptation. Lee, unlike Oakley, paid less attention to constructing the world around them and focused more closely on managing the characters’ emotions. What is missing here is calibration, subtlety: everything is turned up to eleven all the time.

Even so, this version stands on its own and does not feel like a forced adaptation or one constructed to satisfy the spirit of its time. Quite the opposite, it is striking that the romantic tone of the original text has been left almost completely intact — it is unusual these days to see female characters obsessing over the love of a man — and that no attempt has been made to turn the protagonists into more independent women. At the same time, by emphasizing the economic difficulties facing the sisters’ family, this version once again makes clear that getting something resembling love requires both things: sense and sensibility. With one without the other, you don’t get very far. Not then, and not now.