Trishna

Directed by Michael Winterbottom

(R)

**

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Director Michael Winterbottom constantly tries new things and, almost always, produces interesting results, said Stephanie Zacharek in Movieline.com. His recent credits include a comedic road trip (The Trip) and an earnest drama (A Mighty Heart), but Trishna is “a bit of an oddity.” He uses Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles as inspiration, but changes the location from 19th-century England to modern-day India for the story of a young woman saved from poverty by her seemingly sweet lover, who then degrades her. Hardy’s story “migrates easily” to India, “where class and boundaries seem to shift every second,” said Ann Hornaday in The Washington Post. And Winterbottom’s “signature fluid filming style” captures the country’s “poetry and poverty with equal enthusiasm.” The problems are Freida Pinto as Trishna and Riz Ahmed as her lover, said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. This role keeps the “strikingly beautiful” actress “submissive and inexpressive.” Ahmed is similarly vacant, and “his transformation from benign boyfriend to vile satyr is as mysterious to us as it is to poor Trishna.”