Netflix’s Persuasion Isn’t Just Bad Austen. It’s One of the Worst Movies in Years.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that every essay relating to the work of Jane Austen must kick off with those words from the opening line of Pride and Prejudice. As played by Dakota Johnson, the novel’s heroine Anne Elliot, a lovelorn, bookish, self-effacing woman on the cusp of spinsterhood, becomes an insufferably coy scatterbrain who speaks in 21st-century buzzwords and breaks the fourth wall with monotonous frequency, incessantly inviting the viewer to join her as she rolls her eyes Jim-in-The-Office-style at her fellow characters and once, unforgivably, interrupts a moment of romantic bliss to wink directly at the camera. The best male character, though he still boasts only one attribute, is Sir Walter Elliot, Anne’s fatuous, social-climbing father, played by the always-welcome Richard E. Grant. If you’re in it exclusively for the dresses, the sets, and the heaps of pastel-colored pastries, Persuasion may bear watching, but it’s hard to overstate what unpleasant company Johnson’s Anne Elliot is. Early in Austen’s novel—an autumnal, reflective work that the author wrote while she was dying, and that was published after her death at age 41—she describes Anne and Wentworth’s long-ago affair as “a short period of exquisite felicity.” The only such moment afforded by Persuasion is when the closing credits finally start to roll.