‘Prima Facie’ Review: Cynthia Erivo Stars as a Lawyer Who Becomes a Rape Victim in This Misfire of an Adaptation
Developing story first seen 3 hours ago
Additional detail from The Hollywood Reporter's review confirms that after a brief, effective section in which Cynthia Erivo's character reports her assault to police, "Prima Facie" reverts to weaker filmmaking, becoming a courtroom drama that the critic says loses focus once Tessa takes the witness stand. This reinforces the review's overall verdict: the film adaptation of Suzie Miller's award-winning one-woman play largely fails to translate its urgent message about rape victims and the justice system onto screen, despite the material's continued importance.
Erivo plays Tessa Ensler, a successful barrister who is raped by a colleague, Julian (Daniel Ings), she had been dating, shattering her faith in the legal system she has spent her career upholding. Director Susanna White is criticised for heavy-handed visual symbolism, an intrusive voiceover and a preachy tone, in contrast to the stage version's success, which won the 2023 Olivier for Best New Play and saw Jodie Comer take home Best Actress and a Tony. The reviewer singles out the police-station scene as the film's strongest moment, but says the subsequent courtroom sequence, including Tessa's testimony, fails to sustain that impact.
- Review says "Prima Facie" film falters again once the courtroom trial begins.
- Cynthia Erivo plays a barrister raped by a colleague she dated.
- Director's heavy-handed style undercuts the stage play's acclaimed source material.
New here? Start with this
Prima Facie is a courtroom drama adapted from Suzie Miller's stage play, which won the 2023 Olivier for Best New Play and later earned Jodie Comer a Tony on Broadway. The film version stars Cynthia Erivo as Tessa Ensler, a successful barrister whose confidence in the legal system she has built her career on is shattered when she is raped by a colleague she had been seeing.
The story centres on how the justice system handles rape cases, a subject the original play was praised for tackling with unusual force by putting a legal professional on the other side of the process she knows so well. Susanna White directs the film adaptation, with Daniel Ings playing Julian, the colleague accused of the assault.
This matters because it is a high-profile screen adaptation of a work that had significant cultural impact on stage, tackling a subject of ongoing public concern, and its critical reception says something about whether that impact can carry over to film.
Full account
Prima Facie, an adaptation of Suzie Miller's acclaimed one-woman play, had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, screening to a standing ovation at Roy Thomson Hall. Directed by Susanna White, whose previous credits include Bleak House, Jane Eyre and the thriller Our Kind of Traitor, the film stars Cynthia Erivo as Tessa, a barrister on the rise in London who frequently handles sexual assault cases. Her assured command of the courtroom is upended when she herself is raped by a colleague, forcing her to confront the very legal system she has built her career defending.
The film traces Tessa's journey from a working-class background, having reached the profession via a Cambridge scholarship, into the rarefied, privileged world of the Old Bailey, where she nonetheless holds her own among more socially advantaged peers. Early scenes establish her rapport with a fellow rising lawyer, Julian, played by Daniel Ings, with whom she begins a relationship. Miller's narrative is described as deliberately constructing the assault to sit in legally ambiguous territory: after an evening of drinking and consensual sex, Tessa refuses Julian's further advances, and what follows is unambiguously a violation, even as it exposes the fine legal distinctions around consent that the story is built to interrogate.
One review of the film was highly critical of its execution, arguing that while Prima Facie succeeds as an urgent statement about the treatment of rape victims within the justice system, it falters badly as cinema. It singled out heavy-handed visual choices — including literal cutaway imagery of horses to illustrate a spoken metaphor, and shattered-glass imagery during the assault — alongside an intrusive voiceover carried over from the stage script and a finale it considered overly didactic. That review nonetheless praised strong supporting performances, including Ings' turn against type, and found a brief mid-film stretch to be genuinely powerful, even as it judged the whole a disappointment given the source material's stage success.
Coverage of the Toronto premiere placed greater weight on the significance of Erivo's casting and the audience's warm reception rather than on critical judgment of the finished film. Erivo, already known for Oscar-nominated performances as Harriet Tubman and as Elphaba in Wicked, and a Tony win for The Color Purple, spoke at a post-screening Q&A about consulting Black women barristers to shape Tessa's characterisation, noting she wanted the character's outside life to inform her professional manner. This coverage also highlighted that casting a woman of colour from a working-class background adds a racial and socio-economic dimension largely absent from the original stage production, which starred Jodie Comer and won the Best Actress Olivier along with a Tony. The supporting cast also includes Elizabeth Dulau and Simon Russell Beale.
Where outlets differ
One outlet is a critical review that judges the finished film a near-total misfire despite an important message, citing clunky voiceover, overly literal visual metaphors and a preachy ending; the other is festival reportage focused on the premiere's warm reception (a standing ovation) rather than offering a critical verdict on quality.
The review names Tessa's surname as 'Ensler', while the festival report refers to her only as 'Tessa' without a surname.
The festival report emphasises the significance of Erivo's race and working-class background as a new interpretive layer compared with Jodie Comer's original stage portrayal, including Erivo's own comments on researching Black women barristers; the review focuses mainly on plot mechanics and does not address this casting dimension.
The review provides detailed plot and character analysis (Tessa's background, the Julian relationship, the assault's legal ambiguity), whereas the festival piece is lighter on plot detail and more focused on Erivo's career context and quotes from the Q&A.
More coverage