The Ending of Hedda, Explained

*Spoilers for the plot of Hedda, streaming now on Prime*

In 1891, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler debuted on a European stage. A restless white woman trapped in a patriarchal society that’s wrestled away control over her life at every turn, Hedda moves in ways that are dangerous, deadly and wholly unpredictable to everyone who doesn’t understand what’s at the core of her desperation. But writer-director Nia DaCosta understands.

It’s no wonder that DaCosta’s 2025 film adaptation Hedda begins with talk of a “bloody mess on the carpet.” This is a movie about life and death, and who has the power to make it or take it. The stakes are high in writer-director Nia DaCosta’s fourth feature film, and no one appears more in control than the titular anti-heroine.

Played like a run-away train by Tessa Thompson in her best performance to date, Hedda Gabler, now a biracial Black woman and bastard daughter of the famous white General Gabler in 1950s England, appears calm, flippant even, as two policemen sit before her. They’re questioning her about a shooting and possible death that took place at her new palatial estate. She’d thrown a party the night before to celebrate the (unaffordable) home purchase and her 6-month marriage to the mediocre white academic George Tessman (Tom Bateman). She is framed dead center and defiant as the policemen sit across the table, their backs to us. This is the gift of DaCosta’s Hedda.

Where Ibsen’s Hedda is gossiped about for 21 pages before she ever enters the scene, and the party that leads to catastrophe takes place offstage and away from her, DaCosta’s Hedda puts the power to tell her own story directly in Hedda’s hands from the first frame. She is no less trapped under patriarchy in the 1950s than the original character, and also suffers the additional, intersecting oppressions of race, class, and sexual orientation. While her past, impossible lover that she once threatened with a loaded pistol is a man named Ejlert Lovborg in the play, 2025’s Hedda flips Ejlert into Eileen, making Hedda a closeted woman who uses her sexuality to rend control back from the men around her, while longing for the love of the estranged Eileen. And now, the party is both her idea and totally under her control. The policemen ask her to start from the beginning, and she does.

Twenty-four hours earlier, Hedda is in a lake. That evening’s party is already set, the house is all-but purchased, and the tremendous debt George will take on is assured to be covered when he’s appointed, as promised, to a professorship at the university. But Hedda has never felt more trapped, less in control. Despondent, she teeters on death’s edge when an unsuspecting George calls out to her to tell her that Eileen Lovborg (a brilliant Nina Hoss) is on the phone for her. “I trust one thing in a woman,” reads the opening quote of the film, “that she will not come back to life after she’s dead.” An untrustworthy Hedda springs back to life, running out of the lake and dropping the rocks she had in her pockets back onto the shore. Eileen confirms she will come to the party that night. Whether it’s love for Eileen or a renewed sense of purpose that reignites Hedda remains to be seen.

Ditching her suicide attempt, she kills her maids’ decorations for the party instead, stripping away traditional tablecloths and flower arrangements. She aims her father’s pistol and shoots at the sky and then again at a race-swapped Judge Brak (Nicholas Pinnok), a friend of her father’s whose enormous loan has made it possible for George to buy the estate. The gunshot frightens him but she plays off the assault as a joke, another one of her many whimsicalities, as she calls them, that led to her being shackled to a castle that she told George she wanted simply because there was a lull in their conversation one night.

In truth, she knows this debt to Brak gives him power over her, which she cannot abide. When he tries later on at the party to sexually force himself onto her, she says “You have no power over me. I control this; I say when and where.” It isn’t as true as she’d like to believe, but it gets him off of her, for the moment. When a pigeon flies near her, she aims at it, but chooses not to fire. Though mental unwellness is surely a factor in why she behaves the way she does, Hedda is quite lucid. She is the maestro of death. Her kills must be selective, purposeful, intentional; she’s not as unpredictable as the people around her assume her to be.

But she also orchestrates life. When a friend complains to Hedda that the party is dull, she insists the jazz band play something more lively and moves her guests onto the dance floor like chess pieces. In the best scene of the film, DaCosta’s eye (and cinematographer Sean Babbit’s camera) flows in and out and above a waltzing Hedda, bathed in glowing light, dressed in luxurious green (with envy) fabrics, lips a sumptuous blood red. She’s lost in the music, eyes closed and breathing–alive in a way we have yet to see her. It’s a glimpse into that wild, carefree and joyful person that Hedda was hinted to be, before being (allegedly) domesticated. The clever sound design shrinks the music to silence as we only hear her breath of life. Whatever she’s imagining that’s allowed her to feel and move like a free woman, is obviously not present in that big castle, its grand ballroom, nor her desperate-to-control-her husband.

And when she finally opens her eyes again, Eileen is there, like Hedda had manifested her. Shook by her own power, her breath catches. She seems to float towards Eileen as the rest of the world stays still. The look on her face could be mistaken for happiness, but it’s hunger. She licks her lips, rubs her fingers together. She plans a feast.

But all hell breaks loose in her when she realizes that Eileen has a new lover, Thea (Imogen Poots) and that Eileen loves Thea and no longer loves Hedda. Eileen, in her righteous white lesbian courage, calls the white Thea “brave,” because Thea left her husband to be with Eileen. She calls Hedda a “coward” because Hedda would never be with Eileen in public, nor pursue academia the way Eileen has inspired Thea to do.

“How many women professors are at that university?” Hedda asks Eileen, who must admit that there are only two. “And they’re both white,” Hedda punctuates but still doesn’t manage to penetrate Eileen’s self-righteousness. Hedda, a Black child of an unmarried Black woman and a famous white father, was born into scandal, of which she had no control. To be a lesbian as well would’ve finished her off in society, though as we saw from the first scene of her in the lake, she’s not long for the world as it is.

Eileen makes a mockery of Hedda’s loveless marriage to a mediocre white man not understanding that it’s the power of life and death that’s at stake. Obviously, the handsome, older, Judge Brak wanted her and is much more wealthy and powerful than George is, but Judge Brak not only wants to control her, but has the will and capability to do it. As a close friend of her father’s, who knows how long Brak has been exerting his will over Hedda.

George, on the other hand, is a nerd and a wimp. Though he tries to manhandle her from time to time, she slips away and he lets her go. When George notices that her red lipstick is smeared from obviously kissing Brak in a backroom, she tells him, “don’t fuss,” and he doesn’t. Though he’s obviously distressed, he holds her hand and they watch the fireworks at the party together. She can control George with sex and desire. He would go into huge debt to buy a house for her at one of her whims. Power over George is obviously not enough to fulfill Hedda, but if she has to be married to a man in order to survive in 1950s society, then she could do worse than a boring, needy, allegedly-on-the-rise professor who can be controlled.

But Eileen jeopardizes that when she shares that she’s all but assured to take the professor role at the university that George is competing for, after her groundbreaking book about sex, kinks and fetishes is published. Boring George with no book publications could hardly compete. That would mean Hedda and George giving up the new house and any hopes for the prestige that was within her grasp. Hedda stalks after Eileen and Thea, stealing glances through reflections in mirrors in the ballroom, in the hallways. There are two games at play, two Heddas in the room at any moment.

Each guest is a pawn in her plan to get Eileen back under her control, to wrest control back over Hedda’s own life. She kills two birds with one stone when she arranges for Eileen’s friend to have sex with the wife of Professor Greenwood who will make the decision between George and Eileen for the job. It doesn’t hurt that the wife also called Hedda “duskier than I’d imagined” when they first meet at the party–racism that Hedda will not let slide in her own home. Hedda liquors up Professor Greenwood and then points him in the direction of where his wife is shagging, leading to a violent confrontation.

A 3-months-sober Eileen also falls right into Hedda’s trap. After Hedda insinuates that Professor Greenwood felt contempt for her for drinking soda instead of alcohol and thought her intellectually weak, Eileen is easily pushed back into the bottle, devastating her sober coach Thea in the process and driving a wedge between the lovers.

In another brilliant change from the play, Hedda gets Eileen so liquored up and distracted–making each of her guests jump into the lake with their clothes on–Hedda’s able to steal the only copy of Eileen’s new book and make Eileen believe that she jumped into the lake with it. Ejlert simply gets drunk with the fellas and drops the manuscript on the road in the play, but DaCosta consistently keeps the wheel in Hedda’s hands. This is her devious plotting, her wicked execution. Hedda also sets Eileen up for one final humiliation in front of her academic colleagues. Soaking wet from the lake, Eileen’s breasts have peaked through her dress. Assured by Hedda that she looks perfect, Eileen goes for one last drink with the fellas in the drawing room, flashing herself to everyone. A horrified Thea can’t bear to watch Eileen make a fool of herself. The most aware of Hedda’s evil machinations, Thea confronts Hedda who merely laughs, emboldened by her own growing power.

This is when Eileen realizes her manuscript is lost and has to confess to Thea that all of their hard work is gone forever. A disgusted Thea breaks up with Eileen as a grinning Hedda watches in the shadows. She gets in position for the final blow–a move so heinous it reveals the depths of her demand for control.

In the course of a few hours in Hedda’s orbit, Eileen has been totally broken down. At her lowest and most depressed and suicidal state, without her book and without Thea, Eileen is unprepared as Hedda strikes her final blow. Though she’s got Eileen’s manuscript safely tucked away inside her gun case, she pulls out a loaded gun and offers that to Eileen instead. Years before, when Eileen broke up with Hedda, Hedda had threatened to shoot Eileen with that same gun. The only thing stopping her, she confesses, is that she knew Eileen had wanted her to shoot. That would’ve put Eileen in control, though Hedda would’ve been the one pulling the trigger. Now the action is reversed. Though Eileen would pull the trigger herself, it will be at the hands of Hedda, exactly the way Hedda wants it. Eileen leaves to do the deed and Hedda quickly acts to burn the manuscript in the fireplace to seal not only Eileen’s fate but also her legacy. Total control.

When George comes in and realizes what Hedda is doing, he tries, like a wimp and a coward, to stop her–meaning he doesn’t try that hard at all. In fact, when she tells him that she’s doing it for him, for them, because she’s pregnant with his child (a lie), he’s too overcome by the thought that this uncontrollable woman might be out of control for him. They have sex as that lurking creep Judge Brak listens on from behind the door (he is too fine for this!!).

As dawn rises, Eileen can’t manage to pull the trigger, but while tussling with a friend, the gun goes off. She’s brought into the house, a bloody mess on the carpet, leading us back to the events of the opening scene with police. Satisfied with her testimony that she was nowhere around when Eileen was shot, the police let her go as she waits, distressed, for news of whether Eileen will survive. In a blow to Hedda, she runs into George and Thea huddled together and finds out they are working to reassemble Eileen’s book. She reminds George of what helping Eileen at the expense of his own research will mean for them and he quickly answers, they’ll just get a smaller house. A dagger. George, suddenly full of a passion of his own, and Thea determined to be a published author only emphasize Hedda’s lack of purpose as they both swat away her offer to help. With one bright idea from George and Thea, Hedda’s lost the control she worked so hard to gain.

As she stashes away her gun case in tears, Judge Brak appears from the shadows with her missing gun. He knows everything Hedda has done, from the manuscript to how Eileen got the gun. If she doesn’t give herself to him, he will tell the police everything. He’s got her now. But Hedda won’t have it. She shoots the final bullets at Brak but misses. She runs away to the lake but he catches her before she can make it. Trigger warning: he tries to rape her there on the ground in broad daylight. In his frustration at her fighting back, he chokes her. It’s not until George calls from the house for Hedda that Brak realizes what he’s doing and stalks away in horror, disgust and rage.

The moment he frees her, Hedda takes off for the lake, nothing stopping her this time. She fills her pockets with the same rocks and dredges herself deeper and deeper into the lake. If anyone is going to control her life, take her life, it won’t be Brak’s violence. It won’t be Eileen’s rejection. It won’t be George’s indifference. It will be by her own hands. When the water is up to her neck, she hears what George has been calling to her: Eileen is awake! She smiles and the screen goes black.

In the play, Ejlert dies in the accidental shooting and, knowing Brak will implicate her in the scandal, Hedda shoots herself in the head. A final act that confuses everyone around her. Even with DaCosta’s choice to keep Eileen alive, there’s plenty of scandal in which Hedda could still be implicated in this anti-Black society, plenty of ways for her to lose control, plenty of reasons to finish this last act of agency over her own body. But that devious smile at the news of Eileen’s revival suggests Hedda’s own rebirth. She’s back in the game and will likely spring out of the water as she did before, a conductor of chaos, ready to wrestle with power another day.

MORE BLACK THEATER

This month, I also had the absolute pleasure of watching my first August Wilson play on the stage, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at A Noise Within playhouse in Pasadena. Though its had its final run in Pasadena this year, you can catch Taraji P. Henson and Cedrick the Entertainer in the iconic roles in the Broadway revival next March.

And I’ve been waiting to see the Broadway sensation JaJa’s African Hairbraiding too, and finally saw it here in LA at the Center Theatre Group. It was a must-see, brilliant production and I’m sorry to say it’s now closed, but the Tony-Award-winning play centered the stories of African immigrants in Harlem and the true cost of becoming American, making the heartfelt dramedy incredibly timely and prophetic as ICE ramps up its kidnappings of immigrant workers from all communities in real life.

Check out snaps from both plays on IG here:

@brookeobie