The Jane Austen of 2026 looks an awful lot like a Brontë. In the new Sense and Sensibility, Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) and Elinor Dashwood (Daisy Edgar-Jones) run wild across Devon with blackberry-stained lips; rough, linen frocks; and loose, wind-whipped tresses. They are the daughters of the Earth – not an eggshell blue or ringlet in sight – whose passions bleed out into the wildflowers, the caterpillars, and the bumblebees; their reflections, caught in the window glass, paint them across red-hot sunsets.
Director Georgia Oakley’s take on Austen is undeniably gorgeous. Shot on 35mm film, there’s a gentle moodiness to cinematographer Arnaud Potier’s use of natural lighting, and to the suppressed hunger sensed in Edgar-Jones’s bright, open, vulnerable features. Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice (2005) was already an earthier take on Austen, but Oakley draws more directly from Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2011), with its supporting cast of insects, a Greek chorus to echo its characters’ feral impulses.
