I saw the new Sense And Sensibility (2026) in a theatre full of literature students and teachers which was like watching cricket with the umpires. Every gasp had a subtext. When the film did something to Austen, the audience reached for a critical pencil. Georgia Oakley’s adaptation, written by Diana Reid, released in Indian theatres this week. Its hypothesis: was the quarrel between Elinor (sense) and Marianne (sensibility) ever as tidy as the title suggests? In the novel, Elinor does the accounting. Austen tells us in chapter one that her feelings were strong, “but she knew how to govern them.” She tallies the cost of everything, including her own silence. Marianne is “eager in everything: her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation.” She spends feelings like an unlimited credit account; the last chapters are the bank calling in the debt. Nobody doubts who was prudent. Oakley sees it differently: a “symbiotic” arrangement where each sister learns from the other, their bond the central love story. A fair reading: Elinor’s stiff upper lip costs her dearly, and the film shows us the receipt.

 

When the novel’s Marianne cries “Cold-hearted Elinor!” the film hears the wound beneath. But it is also a revision. Austen’s irony depended on a pecking order of good judgment; abolish it and you can lose the joke. Some friends me felt Marianne’s passion was over-explained, like footnoting a firework. The plot is efficiently shuffled. The younger Eliza, whom Willoughby ruins and abandons, is gone; he is tied to the elder Eliza’s pregnancy and death. He gets one crime instead of two, Colonel Brandon gets one angst instead of a family heirloom of griefs. Lost is Austen’s bleak point that it happens again to the next girl in line. Then Edward: his tangle with Lucy Steele now carries family pressure and inheritance stakes. Reid speaks of making the men “worthy” of the sisters. I wish she hadn’t: “worthy” is not in Austen’s vocabulary. Her Edward is decent, weak and faintly ridiculous, which is why we like him. A worthy Edward is a Darcy who works out at the gym. The duel is the biggest liberty. In the book it happens offstage, reaching us secondhand as Brandon’s story, a neat lesson in how women hear of men’s violence: over tea, after the fact. Here actual men stand in an actual field, so Hollywood. Why keep the camera in the drawing room when pistols are available? But the story steps outside just when Austen kept it indoors.

 

The film is better, or at least bolder, in its look. Barton Cottage is damp and shabby; the dresses are worn, mended and worn again, the production’s best idea. Austen never romanticized money. Marianne may lecture on happiness, but Elinor settles it in one line: “wealth has much to do with it.” A draughty cottage says in one shot what pages of narration say about the Dashwoods’ decline. Mrs Dashwood is cast younger (Caitriona Balfe), seeming one of the girls rather than a chaperone with a pension.

 

That suits her: Austen calls Elinor’s self-governance “a knowledge which her mother had yet to learn.” Mrs Dashwood is as impulsive as her daughters, and less supervised than the family pets. Sadly, no screenplay can import Austen’s voice, that cool, amused narrator who caresses her characters and stabs them in one sentence. The film gives us stressed faces, realistic costumes and sets, and a ‘duel’. After the lights came up, verdicts differed. One found it safe and pretty, another loved the detailing and dancing, a third talked only of the sisters’ chemistry. I suspect each saw a different aspect of the film Oakley made. For me, she has exchanged some of the novel’s tongue-in-cheek irony for a general vibe of feelgoodness. That trade-off, more than any addition or deletion, is the difference between the novel and the novelty. n