Persuasion's mixed reviews are calling the Netflix movie "vaguely mortifying" and a "sweet distraction"
Persuasion, the Netflix adaptation of Jane Austen's classic novel, is out in selected cinemas today before it arrives on the streamer next week – and the reviews are in.
The movie sees Dakota Johnson star as Anne Elliot, a young woman living with her snobby family who are on the brink of bankruptcy. She may only be 27, but this is the 19th Century, and therefore she's on the brink of spinsterhood, mourning the lost love of Frederick Wentworth (Cosmo Jarvis), a man her family persuaded her not to marry eight years before. That is, until he reappears in her life. The cast also includes Henry Golding, Richard E. Grant, Suki Waterhouse, Nikki Amuka-Bird, and Mia McKenna-Bruce.
The movie was helmed by theatre director Carrie Cracknell in her feature debut and she's put a modern twist on the adaption, despite keeping its Regency setting. But what do the critics make of Persuasion?
"At no point during Carrie Cracknell’s directorial debut do you ever get the sense that anyone’s actually read Persuasion. For those with even the slightest affinity for Austen’s work, it’s vaguely mortifying to watch – seeing one of her most beautifully moulded protagonists, a sorrowful vessel hounded by the ghosts of lost love, stripped of her poetry and reduced to an Instagram caption about the pitfalls of millennial dating."
"From the minute the trailer dropped, the Austenite gatekeepers were crying sacrilege, and sure, this will rankle lovers of the novel. But it’s a movie that knows exactly what it’s doing, using its source as a baseline rather than an unyielding blueprint, with a star ideally chosen to navigate its century-crossing gambit. She’s a woman susceptible to persuasion but ultimately driven by her own sense of agency. Approached as
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