‘Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day’ Review: Haley Bennett Is Starry-Eyed in a Literary Adaptation With Much Heart and a Heavy Hand
Variety | 03.06.2026 07:42
Virginia Woolf herself was not the greatest admirer of her 1919 novel “Night and Day,” a complex and somewhat elusive work that wove a pensive reflection on women’s suffrage through a quasi-Shakespearean rotation of misbegotten and rearranged courtships — in a style far removed from the angular modernism of her later works. It remains perhaps the most underexposed of her books, and though it’s easy to imagine the period romantic comedy that Merchant-Ivory-style filmmakers might have made of it, it’s taken until now for anyone to attempt an adaptation. Though Tina Gharavi‘s film stresses its allegiance to the text with the title “Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day,” it’s actually quite a departure: Playing down the novel’s tangled relationships in favor of a straightforwardly empowering celebration of female agency and education, it trades some of the author’s elegance and nuance for a more crowdpleasing message.
