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# Two Hundred Years Later, Sense and Sensibility Still Knows Exactly Who We Are
- URL: https://www.filmoiselle.com/sense-and-sensibility-2026-review/
- Published: 2026-10-16T13:05:32.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-16T13:05:32.000Z
- Description: Georgia Oakley's warm, funny, aching new adaptation understands that the girls Jane Austen wrote in 1811 are the same girls sitting in the cinema today.
- Author: Daria Ershova
- Tags: Film & TV News, Editor's Picks

**⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️**

There is a moment, somewhere in the middle of Georgia Oakley's new [*Sense and Sensibility*](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13609648/?ref=filmoiselle.com), when the camera lingers on a spiderweb beaded with rain, and you understand everything you need to know about the film you are watching. This is a story told in small, patient details, in the weight of a glance held a second too long and the sound of rain against a window, and that tenderness runs through every frame. It is warm in a way period drama so rarely allows itself to be, and it was that warmth, more than anything, that stayed with me long after the theater lights came up.

Oakley, working from a screenplay by Diana Reid, has done something rather difficult. She has taken a story most of us already know by heart and made it feel fresh, a little funnier and a little deeper than we expected, without losing the ache at its center. Daisy Edgar-Jones anchors the film as Elinor Dashwood, all restraint and buried devotion, and Esmé Creed-Miles gives Marianne the full, reckless force of a young woman who feels everything at a thousand degrees. Caitríona Balfe is lovely as their mother, George MacKay brings a bashful decency to Edward Ferrars, and Frank Dillane makes Willoughby a charming disaster we have all, at one point or another, talked ourselves into.

But the person who truly stole the film, who walked away with every scene she touched, is Fiona Shaw as Mrs. Jennings. A whole generation knows Shaw as Aunt Petunia from the Harry Potter films, and watching her here was a beautiful and nostalgic moment. Her Mrs. Jennings is a glorious, meddling delight, and it is her laugh, her running commentary, her refusal to let a room stay sad for too long, that gives the film its heartbeat. She takes the saddest moments and finds the life in them, and in doing so she reminds you that grief and comedy have always lived in the same house.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/64/c7/64c7f8e7-273c-4606-ad9c-8a12269b9b66/content/images/2026/10/Sense-and-Sensibility-2026.jpg)

Courtesy of Alex Bailey

It would be easy to compare this to the 1995 version, and I will admit that one will always hold a particular place in my heart. 2026 version is a film in conversation with it, warmer in places, sharper in others, and carried along by a score so beautiful I wanted to sit in the dark and listen to it twice.

What struck me most, though, was not anything on the screen. It was the room. I saw this in a cinema full of women, and something happened in there that I have not felt in a long time. When Elinor and Edward finally found their way to each other at the end, the entire theatre erupted into applause. Strangers, clapping in the dark, for two fictional people in love. It was surreal and moving, and it told me something about why this story will live on far beyond our generation.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/64/c7/64c7f8e7-273c-4606-ad9c-8a12269b9b66/content/images/2026/10/Sense-and-Sensibility-2026-still.jpg)

Courtesy of Focus Features

Jane Austen published Sense and Sensibility in 1811, more than two hundred years ago, and it remains almost unbearably current. The sisters at its heart are still us. Girls will always be girls, after all, falling too fast and too hard, mistaking charm for character, finding themselves tangled in something that looks like love and behaves like a situation they cannot name. Marianne gives her whole heart to a man who was never going to keep it, and Elinor swallows her own longing until it nearly undoes her, and every woman in that cinema recognized both of them, because we have been both of them. What Oakley understands, and what Austen understood first, is that there is nothing small or silly about any of it. The way women love, and the courage it takes to survive loving the wrong person, has always deserved to be taken seriously. This film takes it seriously, and it makes it beautiful.

Four stars. A warm, funny, deeply felt adaptation that earns every one of its tears, and a reminder that the oldest stories about women are often the ones that still see us most clearly.

**Sense and Sensibility is directed by Georgia Oakley and written by Diana Reid, from a Working Title production, released by Focus Features in the United States and Universal Pictures internationally. Our thanks to the Taramount team behind the film for a gorgeous night at the cinema.*