Unlike Wuthering Heights, the new Sense and Sensibility film is nearly perfect. One glaring detail lets it down

Review: Millions of Jane Austen fans have been excited and apprehensive about the new film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, especially after Emerald Fennell’s divisive version of Wuthering Heights hit screens earlier this year.

After seeing the film I’ve got just one thing to say: romantic period drama fans, we’re so back.

An Austen film adaptation hasn’t made my heart flutter like this since Joe Wright’s 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice, and I’m happy to report Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esme Creed-Miles are perfectly cast as Elinor and Marianne Dashwood.

Edgar-Jones plays Elinor as the ultimate eldest daughter, sensible and stalwart even when it means giving up her own chance at happiness, while Creed-Miles is wild and willful while still making Marianne deeply endearing.

The blokes are great too: George MacKay won me over as Edward Ferrars literally 30 seconds after he first appeared on-screen, and Herbert Nordrum’s Colonel Brandon is almost as good as Alan Rickman’s in 1995.

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Every frame looks like an oil painting, the lighting and colour grading are rich and intentional (a rare thing in the era of Netflix lighting) if a little dark at times, and Roger Goula’s score is, in a word, sublime.

In short, I genuinely adored this version of Sense and Sensibility – except for one detail.

And no, it wasn’t the hair.

(For those who missed it, there was uproar over the fact that Elinor and Marianne regularly wear their hair down in the film, which was typically considered improper or immodest during the regency era.)

The film features two significant scenes set at balls where the Dashwood sisters finally have the opportunity to get physically close to their love interests.

Both scenes are full of romantic tension as the characters, so restricted by the expectations of polite society, share brief touches and heated looks as they turn about the room, surrounded by other people and yet focused only on each other.

The only problem is that the dance choreography this film is utterly bizarre.

Instead of the simple, graceful steps we’ve all come to expect from regency films, Sense and Sensibility goes for more period-accurate moves that have the cast spinning and flapping about like geese.

There are weird head turns, dramatic hand flourishes, and steps that look more like modern interpretive dance than something out of an Austen story.

Is it true that actual regency era dances were lively and bouncy? Yes.

Does it still look silly when Edgar-Jones and MacKay do it during what is supposed to be a romantically charged moment? Also yes.

Director Georgia Oakley and Australian screenwriter Diana Reed have taken some other liberties with the plot and characters from the original novel, but they’ve done so in a way that still respects the ethos of the source material.

“I tried to be respectful but not reverent ... I was very open to changing things,” Reid told Town & Country.

She massaged the romance between Elinor and Edward and modernised parts of Austen’s novel that just wouldn’t resonate with contemporary audiences.

The result is a film that, on paper, is full of small tweaks and changes, but feels authentic to the story Austen dreamed up more than 200 years ago.

Fennell, take note: you don’t have to completely revolutionise a period romance and stuff it full of sex and anachronisms to make it work for modern viewers.

A big part of the reason this adaptation of Sense and Sensibility is so good – apart from the great casting, stunning visuals, and solid script – is because it stays true to the most important love story in the original: the love between Elinor and Marianne.

“Something that drew me to Sense and Sensibility and makes it stand apart from other Jane Austen novels is that the central love story is really between the two sisters,” Oakley told Town & Country.

“It follows the same kind of arc as a love story, but the beats are happening between the sisters.

“Their relationship feels to me to be very real. It’s messy, it’s intense, it’s exasperating, but it’s also tender and brutal.”

Edgar-Jones and Creed-Miles bring that tenderness and brutality to vivid life on-screen.

They oscillated between tearful screaming matches and moments of girlish whimsy so authentically that the first thing I wanted to do after the credits rolled is book tickets to see it again with my own little sister.

The relationship between the Dashwood sisters is what really sells this adaptation and has me convinced it will become just as beloved (and rewatchable) as Wright’s Pride and Prejudice.

You just have to get past the dancing.