Prima Facie Film Loses the Play's Raw Power — SkimNews
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- Prima Facie has been adapted from Suzie Miller's 2019 one-woman play into a film directed by Susanna White, with Cynthia Erivo replacing Jodie Comer as Tessa, a criminal defense barrister who becomes the accuser in her own rape case.
- Cynthia Erivo must share the screen with a full cast — including Noma Dumezweni as Tessa's mother, Toheeb Jimoh as her brother, and Daniel Ings as the colleague who rapes her — whereas Comer carried the stage version solo.
- The film makes a three-year time jump from the rape report to the trial, leaving Erivo no runway to chart Tessa's emotional fallout and reducing her performance to what the reviewer calls 'Law & Order blandness.'
- Director Susanna White films the proceedings 'flatly,' and the internal monologue that electrified the play is used so sparingly it lands as a 'half-hearted gimmick,' according to the review.
- The reviewer argues that expanding the story beyond one woman's testimony makes the film 'not universal but frustratingly anodyne,' washing away the play's 'spiky humor' and 'shattering valleys.'
- Prima Facie is premiering at the Toronto film festival and is seeking distribution.
Why it matters: Adapting an Olivier-winning one-woman play into a conventional two-hour feature is a high-risk creative gamble, and this review suggests the gamble failed: the film trades the stage production's ferocious intimacy for procedural flatness, potentially undermining the play's urgent message about how the legal system treats rape survivors at the exact moment it reaches a much wider audience.
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