I have to admit, I am a huge fan of Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie. I first watched the play in Australia, where Sheridan Harbridge originated the role of Tessa, before following with delight as Jodie Comer brought her own interpretation to the West End and Broadway. So, when I learnt that Cynthia Erivo would be the next to don the wig, I was eager to see what she would bring to the role. Alas, I left the screening at LFF with a heavy heart. My disappointment lay not in Cynthia Erivo’s portrayal, but in an on-screen adaptation that struggles to capture the qualities that make the play so moving.
Prima Facie is a work that derives much of its power from the uncomfortable contradictions that sit at its centre. The play’s central character is Tessa Ensler, a talented and ambitious barrister who has built her career defending men accused of sexual assault. Confident in her ability to navigate the legal system, Tessa believes in the power of evidence, cross-examination, and the presumption of innocence. But when she is raped by a colleague who she has been casually dating, she finds herself on the other side of the courtroom, confronting the system she once trusted to deliver justice.
There are two tragedies presented in Prima Facie. The first is Tessa’s rape, and the second is the collision between her personal experience and the professional convictions that have shaped her identity. Susanna White’s film adaptation retains the foundations of this conflict but struggles to sustain its tension. In expanding Tessa’s world, it loses much of the focus necessary to make her changing relationship with the law feel as psychologically and emotionally devastating as it should.
Erivo brings considerable presence to the role, and her portrayal of Tessa’s distress is powerful, however a compelling central performance can only do so much when the narrative surrounding it fails to provide sufficient depth. What makes the original play so brilliant is that the narrative is told by one character, with deep consideration given to her world view. For Tessa’s eventual disillusionment to carry its full weight, we must understand what she believes in before that belief is dismantled. Her professional competence and faith in the judicial process are not incidental details to be established before the story properly begins; they are the things that make her situation devastating. Tessa is not simply discovering that the legal system can fail women; she is confronting the inadequacy of a system she has spent her career defending. The resulting crisis is as much a reckoning with her own worldview as it is with the law itself.
The film does not give this dimension of her character enough room to develop. We understand that Tessa is successful, but there is less opportunity to appreciate the precise nature of her relationship with her profession. Consequently, the distance between the woman she is at the beginning and the woman she becomes feels less pronounced than it should. In the stage production, Tessa’s perspective is inescapable. Every interaction and recollection is filtered through her own voice and physical presence. By introducing additional characters and expanding the narrative beyond Tessa’s immediate perspective, the film sacrifices this intimacy. The decision to give the world around her greater visibility is understandable, but it comes at the expense of what made the original production so compelling.
The film has a powerful story to tell, and Erivo gives a committed performance. But the adaptation’s difficulties lie in the relationship between its narrative choices and the emotional demands of its material. By expanding Tessa’s world without sufficiently deepening our understanding of the professional identity she stands to lose, it weakens the tension that should hold the story together. The result is not a failure to recognise the importance of its subject, but a failure to consistently translate that importance into dramatic force.
What makes Prima Facie so unsettling is that its tragedy exists in the uncomfortable space between personal experience and institutional judgement. It asks us to consider what happens when the structures we trust are unable to accommodate the realities they are supposed to adjudicate. The film retains these questions, but does not always make us feel their full weight. For a story so dependent on the gradual collapse of certainty, too much of that certainty is lost before we have fully understood it in the first place.
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