Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day review: A decent ensemble cast carries this staid adaptation

A novel of two worlds becomes a fitfully enjoyable but diffuse film in this Virginia Woolf adaptation. Woolf’s second novel was a transitional work, poised elusively between Victorian literary conventions and the experiments of her later works.

Director Tina Gharavi’s take flirts with modern stylings but ultimately pares down Woolf’s tricky doorstop to a somewhat staid heritage comedy drama of female empowerment, with a largely decent ensemble cast carrying much of its appeal.

Haley Bennett plays Katharine Hilbery, a young woman dreaming of the stars in 1910. Raised by well-to-do parents (Jennifer Saunders, Timothy Spall), Katharine – or Kit, as she’s often known – is expected to marry would-be poet William Rodney (Jack Whitehall).

But she loves astronomy and longs to study at the University of Cambridge, much to the consternation of her fusty father and the academic establishment of the time. Duly, Kit dresses as a man to gatecrash lectures at the Royal Astronomical Society with her gay cousin Cyril (Misia Butler); meanwhile, she develops a crush on Ralph Denham (Elyas M’Barek), a writer helping Kit’s mother write a biography.

The stage is set for a tangled semi-romance, mounted against a backdrop of suffrage and slowly changing times. While the web of Midsummer Night’s Dream-ish relationships in Woolf’s knotty novel becomes over-simplified and sketchy here, her themes of gender inequality and female self-determination are winningly conveyed through Bennett’s lead turn.

The Widow Clicquot star brims with appealing energy and intellectual curiosity as she gazes at the cosmos from a nighttime swim in Hampstead Ponds or marvels at the spectacle of Halley’s comet. “Show me how big you are,” she says to the sky, daring to dream bigger than society would have her do.

She cuts a dash as she tears across London in a suit to an astronomy gathering, too, and her rage as she faces down sexist opposition from Cambridge dons registers tangibly.

Whitehall adds wry support as the patronising fop with an inflated sense of his own literary abilities, not unlike Mathew Baynton’s Thomas in BBC sitcom Ghosts.

Even if the role is hardly a stretch for an actor who made “posh pillock” his default mode in student comedy Fresh Meat and elsewhere, Whitehall brings a dash of welcome levity to a film that proves a little too buttoned-up and didactic for laughs elsewhere.

Butler acquits himself well as another man in Kit’s close circle, albeit one rewritten from the novel and saddled with a thumpingly clumsy plot twist. M’Barek makes less of an impression as Denham, whose relationship with Kit develops so little on-screen traction that you wonder why screenwriter Justine Waddell – a former actor with form in period dramas herself – did not find ways to excise him altogether.

Kit’s parents never come to life, either: Saunders barely makes an impression, while Spall is cast to type as the jowly “papa” who huffs about “female bloody lunacy” and seems to sport a cigar as a vital extension of his anatomy. And woe betide anyone who touches his newspaper.

The heritage drama essentials of handsome production design and costumes are well-served, however, and Gharavi weaves in a few flashes of dynamism. Bustling handheld camerawork helps to energise a key street-set sequence, while a pulsing synth score provides warmly luminous accompaniment to Kit’s yearnings.

A flame-haired Lily Allen performs solidly as suffragette Mary Datchet, presented as a kind of mouthpiece for progressive thinking. And in another pop flourish, Mercury-nominated indie maverick Nadine Shah’s singing cameo offers an all-too-fleeting hint of the gusto and passion Night and Day needed to properly loosen the ties of genre tradition.

Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day is released in UK cinemas on Friday 19 June.

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