You Need to Hear Fiona Shaw’s Laugh in Sense and Sensibility

It’s a bold move to put Sense and Sensibility back on the big screen when Ang Lee’s 1995 adaptation of the Jane Austen classic remains so popular. Maybe that’s why it’s taken three whole decades for another take on the source material to hit theaters. But with the 2026 Sense and Sensibility, director Georgia Oakley — whose work we loved in 2022’s Blue Jean — has proved that there is still plenty of reason to revisit one of the most beloved romance novels of all time.The bones of the book remain the same: The elder two Dashwood siblings, Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) are functionally exiled to a country cottage along with their widowed mother and younger sister after the passing of the family patriarch. Once there, they navigate the travails of love and courtship against a backdrop of shifting social mores, property ownership, and class differences. The resolutions of their romances will be familiar to anyone who has read the book, or seen one of its many retellings, but Oakley’s Sense and Sensibility is easily the most intimate and textured version yet.Under her lens, along with that of cinematographer Arnaud Potier, we feel everything from the texture of a ball gown to the wind whistling through the fields — but we are especially attuned to the closeness between Elinor and Marianne, which serves as the film’s north star, no matter what happens with Willoughby (Frank Dillane), Colonel Brandon (Herbert Nordrum), or Edward Ferrars (George MacKay). Lee’s 1995 adaptation, which remains one of my favorite Austen films ever made, may not be a Merchant Ivory film on paper, but it has similar underpinnings — and the costumes were designed by mainstays of that famous film company. The shots are wider, the lighting is more generous, the camera remains relatively still. This 2026 Sense and Sensibility, by contrast, is not afraid of some realistic darkness – it is the 1790s after all — nor of inserting us right into the