Astronomy, courtship, and Edwardian suffocation collide in “Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day,” Tina Gharavi’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1919 novel. Haley Bennett stars as Katharine Hilbery, a young woman in 1910 London trying to keep hold of her love of the stars while her family and class keep nudging her toward the marriage plot waiting below.
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WestEnd Films bills the movie as an “un-romantic comedy,” which is a smart enough way into material that could have easily drifted into stiffer prestige territory.
Gharavi directs from a screenplay by Justine Waddell, and the cast also includes pop star Lily Allen, Jack Whitehall, Jennifer Saunders, Elyas M’Barek, Timothy Spall, and Sally Phillips. WestEnd’s synopsis frames Katharine as a passionate astronomer resisting romantic love and marriage against the backdrop of a crumbling Edwardian patriarchy. At the same time, the fuller story setup turns on an unwanted engagement, a suffragette friend named Mary Datchet, and a working-class editor named Ralph Denham, who further complicates the emotional map.
That gives the film a cleaner angle than the usual corseted literary adaptation routine. Between the astronomy thread, the suffrage backdrop, and the promise of a more contemporary comic tone, “Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day” seems to be leaning toward friction rather than reverence, which is probably the better instinct for Woolf’s funniest novel.
The film will world premiere as the opening-night title of SXSW London’s Screen Program this June. It then opens in the U.K. on June 19 and in Germany on July 9. Watch the trailer below.
