The new Sense and Sensibility trailer has muddy hems, dangerous charm, and enough repressed longing to make Jane Austen proud.
Do we need another adaptation of Sense and Sensibility? Strictly speaking, no.
The 1995 film starring Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant, and Alan Rickman remains nearly impossible to improve on. It has heartbreak, humor, rainstorms, and, did I mention Alan Rickman?
But, after watching the new Sense and Sensibility trailer, I’m willing to revisit the Dashwood family all over again.
Meet the New Dashwoods
Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People) stars as Elinor Dashwood, with Esmé Creed-Miles (Hanna) as her younger sister Marianne. Caitríona Balfe (Outlander) plays their mother, and Bodhi Rae Breathnach (Hamnet) is Margaret, the youngest sister. George MacKay (1917) takes on Edward Ferrars, Frank Dillane (Fear the Walking Dead) plays the dangerously charming John Willoughby, Herbert Nordrum (The Worst Person in the World) is Colonel Brandon, and Fiona Shaw (Killing Eve) shows up as Mrs. Jennings — casting that feels designed specifically to make me happy.
The film comes from Focus Features and Working Title, and is directed by Georgia Oakley, based on a script by novelist Diana Reid. It hits U.S. theaters on October 16, 2026.
The cast is stacked with actors who know how to convey several paragraphs of emotional distress with a single slightly prolonged glance. Jane Austen would approve.
A Familiar Disaster, With Mud on the Hem
The trailer opens with the setup we know by heart: after Mr. Dashwood dies, his widow and daughters get pushed out of their family home and forced to start over with far less money. The family lost its security because the system was built to favor men. Shocking.
Oakley has said she was drawn to the way the Dashwoods sit near the center of respectable society while getting pushed toward its edges, and that she wanted the period to feel inhabited rather than polished. It shows: the houses look worn, the countryside looks damp, and the women occasionally look like they’ve encountered actual weather.
Daisy Edgar-Jones Was Born to Suffer Politely
Elinor is the sister who keeps everything under control because somebody has to. She manages the family’s practical problems, worries about money, comforts Marianne, and quietly buries her own feelings for Edward Ferrars — which is more or less Daisy Edgar-Jones’s whole skill set at this point. Anyone who watched Normal People knows she can turn one restrained expression into a full internal collapse.
Esmé Creed-Miles brings a more restless energy to Marianne — open, impulsive, gloriously incapable of pretending not to feel something. Where Elinor folds her emotions into neat squares, Marianne throws hers into the wind and hopes they land somewhere near Willoughby.
Oakley has described the film as a story about human beings first, with sisterhood at its center, and it shows in the trailer — Edgar-Jones and Creed-Miles, who’d worked together before, already have an easy familiarity on screen. The romance may sell the posters, but the siblings are clearly the heart of the story.
Can Anyone Replace Alan Rickman?
No. But that’s not really the job in front of Herbert Nordrum. He doesn’t need to replace Alan Rickman — he needs to find his own way into Colonel Brandon, a man whose whole appeal rests on patience, decency, and recognizing that Marianne is a person rather than a prize. Willoughby gets the dramatic entrances and the dangerous charm; Brandon gets reliability, which becomes a lot more attractive once you’ve survived a few Willoughbys.
Why Do We Keep Coming Back to Austen?
Part of it is obvious — the name is familiar, period dramas photograph beautifully, and studios like stories audiences already recognize. But that doesn’t fully explain why people are still emotionally attached to these characters 200-plus years on.
Austen understood that money shapes romance, that family loyalty can become a burden, and that social rules dressed up as manners are often just a form of control. Her characters are always negotiating between what they feel, what they need, and what they’re allowed to say out loud. None of that reads as old-fashioned.
This Sense and Sensibility seems to aim for a middle ground between traditional and aggressively modern. Most encouragingly, it seems to understand that the story isn’t really about which men the sisters marry. It’s about two women responding differently to the same frightening reality: Elinor survives by controlling herself, Marianne by refusing to. Both approaches cost them something.
My Early Verdict
The 1995 film isn’t going anywhere, and this new version doesn’t need to beat it in some imaginary battle of the bonnets. Based on the trailer, it looks to be a more intimate, less polished look at the Dashwoods as a family, forced to discover how precarious their lives always were. The romance is there, along with the fields, the longing, and the emotionally unavailable men wandering through drawing rooms. But underneath it, this trailer is selling a film about women adjusting to loss without losing each other.
I didn’t need another Sense and Sensibility. But maybe I want one?
