Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day

In 1910s London, young astronomer Katherine ‘Kit’ Hilbery (Haley Bennett) seeks to make her work known to experts in the field, but her progress is hindered by a patriarchal system that doesn’t believe women should be in the sciences.

This one is a bit of a dog’s breakfast in all regards. Narratively it has a load of threads it leaves hanging by the time the credits roll. Kit’s work barely gets touched on and then wraps up. Her romantic life is brought up but it’s not a romance. There’s a story about her mother who is a biographer, again it doesn’t really go anywhere. The list goes on.

Thematically it suffers from the same fate. It’s a feminist film I guess but it barely grazes on women’s suffrage and gay rights before moving on. It’s only a 95 minute film - pick a lane and stay in it!

The direction is also odd, lots of hand-held camera work and super close ups to give it some urgency but it doesn’t quite come off.

As an aside, why is it always a red flag when they have to put the author’s name in the title of the film? Like _ Stephen King’s The Shining_.

It’s like the real film has been left in the editing room, and we are watching the padding around it. It’s more interested in ‘powerful’ sound bytes that have little context or resonance. There’s a scene where Jennifer Saunders gives a 10 second speech but receives a standing ovation—it’s almost farcical.

There are little glimmers of creativity and goodness when the film breaks with reality, and you start to get a sense of what they perhaps were gunning for but didn’t quite reach.