‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ review: Jessica Lange and Ed Harris power delayed adaptation

Dir: Jonathan Kent. UK/US. 2025. 109mins

Written by playwright Eugene O’Neill between 1939 and 1941, and first printed posthumously in 1956, Lengthy Day’s Journey Into Night time could appear small in scale for a movie — the motion takes place in a single home over the course of a single day in 1912 — however is a wealthy, rewarding Pultizer Prize-winning household drama of grief and guilt, anger and recrimination, partially primarily based on O’Neill’s personal life. It’s an actor’s dream in 4 acts; this newest stripped-down adaptation options Jessica Lange, Ed Harris, Ben Foster and Colin Morgan.

This materials stays ripe for repeated interpretation

Jessica Lange takes the lead function of Tyrone household matriarch Mary, which resulted in an Oscar nomination for Katherine Hepburn in 1962. It’s a reprisal of her partnership with British director Jonathan Kent on the 2016 Broadway revival, which gained her a Tony. Shot in Eire in 2022, this model of Lengthy Day’s Journey Into Night time has survived the financing points that temporariliy stopped filming, subsequent delays and a change in illustration (Blue Fox took it in time for this yr’s EFM) to play Glasgow Movie Competition after premiering at Dublin. The solid and materials alone are ample to draw upscale audiences, however this can be a sturdy adaptation in and of itself. 

The play is about round Mary’s return to the household’s Connecticut seaside dwelling after her current therapy for opioid habit. The remainder of the Tyrone household — husband James (Harris) and sons Jamie (Foster) and Edmund (Morgan) — say they’re happy to have her again, but they deal with her with suspicion. They worry a relapse, and none are capable of assist when she unravels, revealing her demons, which embody the long-ago demise of an toddler son. They would favor her to easily maintain quiet. Mary being ‘a dope fiend’, as Edmund places it, brings disgrace on the household — in contrast to the extra socially acceptable alcohol that James and Jamie use.

The festering resentment of issues left unsaid fuels this play, and David Lindsay-Abaire’s unflinching, brisk screenplay traces the rising fissures within the household. It is a work set earlier than the First World Battle but written within the early years of the Second, and Kent and his solid dig into the paranoia, shifting loyalties and darkish realities behind this facade of unity. Usually, members of the family explode with a truthful, hurtful accusation, then virtually instantly try to assuage with a rote apology. Anxiousness and denial over sickness and mortality — Mary is unwilling to face Edmund’s consumption prognosis, simply as James can’t comprehend his spouse’s psychological misery — is a recurring theme.

Each motion Lange makes as Mary appears heavy with the ache of trauma. Taking part in a former stage actor, Harris provides us a James who’s defiantly proud, masking the load of his personal grief, whereas Foster finds vulnerability within the seemingly merciless and carefree older brother Jamie. As Edmund, the child of the household, Morgan shoulders the lion’s share of the melodrama — not solely is he doubtlessly dying, he’s additionally one thing of a tortured poet — however impresses in additional emotional scenes with Lange.

Filming in County Wicklow, cinematographer Mark Wolf favours a standard theatrical set-up, with meticulously composed framing and static digital camera, however successfully juxtaposes the wild expanse of the shoreline with the hermetically sealed setting of the home – modelled on O’Neill’s personal childhood dwelling. Articulate manufacturing design from Anna Rackard fills the rooms with the acquainted paraphernalia of dwelling, but the environment is chilly and oppressive. Photographs of empty rooms and echoey corridors emphasise this lack of heat and the sense of a family at conflict with itself. Music is scant, with the creak of floorboards, the decision of distant gulls and the intrusive name of the foghorn offering an evocative, melancholy soundscape.