Closure is a Lie
For Linda Marrick, my fellow writer on this journey, who reminds me to stop and smell the flowers, and whose kindness is a quiet, beautiful reminder of what it means to be human.
I was scrolling through Prime Video because Netflix had logged me out and I needed something to watch. That’s when I saw Hedda. The name felt familiar, like I’d seen it somewhere before. Then I remembered that the trailer had caught my eye some time ago. And of course, there’s Tessa Thompson, who I love seeing on my screen for reasons I’ve never bothered to understand. The description said “drama/romance,” but the trailer didn’t feel like drama or romance to me.
The movie starts with Hedda coming out of the water water (ocean, sea, I’m not even sure) and these big pebbles fall out of her clothes as she walks back to the house. I didn’t get it at first. I didn’t know what they meant, but before I could think too long, someone from the house was calling her name: “Hedda!” By the end of the film, when she walks back into that same water, pebbles once again in her pocket, it’s obvious. The first time we met her, she was trying to end her life. The last time, she’s about to try again.
Image credit: Google
The story plays out over a single night, at a dinner party she and her husband are hosting. It’s their first one as a married couple in the said house, and you can already sense that something isn’t right. He’s the type who wants to be liked. He is nervous, eager to impress, doing that thing where you can feel someone’s ambition sweating through their suit. She, on the other hand is beautiful, sharp, detached. You can almost smell the boredom on her. The kind of woman you know will be trouble.
This wasn’t a romance. It was a psychological drama. A story that illustrates manipulation . Hedda is a messed-up human being, selfish, controlling, and drawn to chaos. She’s incapable of loving anyone by herself, and yet she’s magnetic in that way that draws people in, even when they know better. It reminded me of how, when you’re young, you live a certain kind of intensity and mistake it for love. You get pulled into a person’s orbit, and even when you move on, you’re never really free. You think it’s passion, when really it’s dysfunction mimicking devotion. You break up, you move on, you meet someone who genuinely loves you and wants to care for you but you’re never completely free. Some part of you is still looking for that first kind of fire, even if it burns you. Hedda lives inside that loop.
Later in the film, you see her caught between what she wants and what she’s capable of giving. She meets people who seem to genuinely care for her, who want to nurture her, who would love her fully but she’s already trapped in her own patterns. I did wonder if she just couldn’t help herself …but the toxicity, chaos, self-sabotage, it’s just in her nature. It has to be. And the film makes you feel the weight of that. You feel how that selfishness and inability to love properly messes with the people around her and, in turn, messes with her.
Get Leti’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The symbolism of the pebbles and the water is subtle but devastating. At first, I didn’t get it but by the end, when I did? It hits like a punch. Away from the literal meaning, she’s carrying the weight of herself, unresolved pain, manipulation and control, and she’s stepping back into it all willingly. It’s terrifyingly inevitable.
While watching this adaptation of Hedda Gabler, I kept thinking about closure. Hedda wants it, the people around her want it, but the film suggests that maybe closure is overrated. Sometimes you can’t close a door on someone like Hedda, because they never really let themselves be fully open in the first place. You can’t fix someone else’s patterns, and the more you try, the more you get pulled into their chaos. The first love, the first intensity, that first toxicity…that doesn’t disappear just because life moves on.
By the time the movie ends, It wasn’t even about drama or romance or even the party anymore. I was thinking about cycles, inevitability, human selfishness, and tragedy. Hedda is not melodramatic; she’s real, in all her selfishness and cruelty, and that’s what makes it feel like a psychological study rather than a romance. It’s an uncomfortable, terrible, heartbreaking kind of honesty.
And the way it’s told, the pacing, the single night, the way the tension builds quietly, the movie does something that most films don’t. It lets you sit with the weight of someone else’s self-destruction without sugarcoating it. You just can’t help thinking about the people in your life who pull you in and out of chaos, the ones who are inherently incapable of love the way you want them to, and the moments you thought were intense but were actually just toxic.
Guess what lingers! The pebbles, the water, the performance of civility, the manipulation, the inevitability of it all. Hedda brings to fore human selfishness, and how love, even when real, can’t always fix it.
Her husband seems to love her, or at least the version of her he thinks he has. There are people who try to reach her, but she’s unreachable. She feeds on control, on power, on pulling people close just to destroy them or push them away. When her ex enters the picture with another love interest, we’re reminded that Hedda was always broken and selfish. The people around her kept hoping she’d love them differently but she never did… never could. You know those people who show you who they are from the start? Better start believing them.
Frankly, the movie isn’t interested in redemption; it’s interested in honesty. And I disliked her character intensely, which is odd for a protagonist. You want to root for your protagonist, flaws and all. I sighed through most of it, but what held me was the writing — clean, unsettling, deliberate. As writers, there’s an unwritten rule that your protagonist should be likeable enough for the audience to root for, flaws and all. Hedda breaks that rule completely.
She stayed with me long after. The quiet manipulation, the hunger for control, the inevitability of her ending. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s human. You leave with that strange ache that comes when something mirrors a truth you’d rather not admit.
Have you seen Hedda yet?
Or will you be watching it? I’m curious what parts of her unraveling you’ll recognize …in her, or maybe in yourself. Drop a comment, share your thoughts, reply to this email or forward this to someone who’s lived through a similar loop.
