Jane Eyre
Directed by: Cary Fukunaga
Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender
Rating: ***
Of the films based on Charlotte Bronte’s beloved 19th-century novel of madness on the moors, this may be the most realistic. It’s bleak, slow and grim, like life in those forbidding stone piles where Jane has spent her sad life. The deadly artifice of society threatens her as much as her escapes into the harsh natural world outside. Wasikowska isn’t up to playing the steel-willed literary heroine and seems mismatched with Fassbender’s dark magnetism. Sally Hawkins, who brutalises Jane as her smirking, sadistic aunt, gets under the skin more than the fog and rot and mistrust.
