The movie, in which Dakota Johnson plays Anne Elliot, premiered on the streaming platform on Friday (15 July).
However, people who have seen the Carrie Cracknell-directed movie are advising viewers to stay away and are pointing out specific dialogue passages as reasons why they should.
Johnson’s character can be heard saying in the movie “Now we’re worse than exes, we’re friends.” She also describes herself as “an empath” and, in one particular scene, states in reference to people’s looks: “It’s often said, ‘If you’re a five in London, you’re a 10 in Bath.”
One Austen enthusiast continued, “The dialogue in Netflix’s Persuasion would be cheesy even if it were a contemporary romcom. It’s just horrible, not because I’m an Austen purist.
The response from the critics has likewise been very cold.
The Persuasion embargo has been lifted, allowing Bustle’s Morgan Leigh Davies to declare that it is the worst Austen adaptation she has ever seen. “Unquestionably unacceptable. Eliminate Netflix. Eliminate Dakota Johnson.
In the meantime, Johnson is “woefully miscast” in the movie, according to Clarisse Loughrey of The Independent, who also noted that there is never any indication that anyone has ever read Persuasion.
With varied casting, contemporary lingo, and fourth-wall-breaking, Netflix is striving for a modernist period piece while freely borrowing from “Dickinson,” “The Great,” and other works. Henry Golding is a jewel who deserves to be airlifted out of this movie and replaced in a genuine Austen adaptation, where he can flourish, because the part of the various world works. Henry Golding plays the villainous Mr. Elliot.
The fourth-wall plot device may have — and ought to have — succeeded if Johnson’s Anne had stayed the plain, shy wallflower Austen originally envisioned, rather than someone who was capable of tipping a gravy boat over her own head.
The failure of the movie’s heroine is the direct cause of everything else that is wrong with it. In the midst of Anne’s personality outbursts, the austere Wentworth (Cosmo Jarvis) comes off as silently wooden. Even worse, the antagonistic figures—like Anne’s father and sisters—quickly lose their intended evil luster.
you could not convince me this is a period drama movie let alone a JANE AUSTEN adaptation with this dialogue… #Persuasion pic.twitter.com/r0JXg3Eqcs
— ً (@darcyslizzy) July 15, 2022
By the time the show reaches its (slightly altered) third act, the movie feels almost completely separated from Jane Austen (it doesn’t help that Richard E. Grant is so obviously having a ball as Sir Walter that you start rooting for him).
Seeing one of Austen’s most exquisitely shaped protagonists, a sorrowful vessel pursued by the ghosts of lost love, stripped of her poetry and reduced to an Instagram caption about the pitfalls of millennial dating, is vaguely mortifying to watch for those with even the slightest affinity for her work.
The movie was described as “really terrible” and “torture” by Brian Viner in a Daily Mail article. He continued, saying that the choice to have Johnson’s Anne frequently violate the fourth wall by looking at the camera demonstrates a “willful misunderstanding of the novel.”
Alice Victoria Winslow and Ron Bass are the authors of this Persuasion adaption. Richard E. Grant, Nikki Amuka-Bird, and Cosmo Jarvis also appear in it.
