‘Prima Facie’ Review: Cynthia Erivo Stars in Tonally Confused Screen Treatment of Provocative #MeToo Stage Play

TIFF: Erivo plays a formidable barrister who is forced to confront the system she once trusted in this disappointing screen version of the celebrated production.

Tessa Ensler, a rising-star criminal defense barrister in London, specializes in defending men accused of sexual assault. In “Prima Facie,” Cynthia Erivo plays her as a hard-working perfectionist for whom it ultimately doesn’t matter whether her client is guilty or innocent: It’s all part of “a game with rules, a game of law.” That is, until she becomes a victim herself and begins to question her belief in the fairness of the British legal system that has elevated her far beyond her working-class origins as the daughter of a single mother who cleans for a living.

Adapted from the play of the same name by playwright-turned-screenwriter Suzie Miller, a former human-rights and criminal-justice lawyer, the film embraces its role as a teaching tool. Sexual violence is staggeringly common, with nearly one in three women globally experiencing physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime, while the vast majority of reported rapes never result in prosecution.

The urgency of the subject matter is not in question. But instead of creating space for the viewer to wrestle with Tessa’s experience, “Prima Facie” employs constant voiceover to overexplain it, leaving the audience almost nothing to discover. By retaining too much of the play’s rhetorical architecture, the film turns a provocative dramatic premise into something closer to an illustrated thesis.

Tonally confused, the film starts like a “The Devil Wears Prada”-style workplace dramedy, then shifts into psychological thriller and finally courtroom drama. Director Susanna White has said the tonal dislocation was intentional, but combined with dizzying shot compositions that never quite cohere into an effective visual language — most notably the superfluous interstitials of horses — the film irritates more than it moves hearts and minds.

Erivo and Daniel Ings, who plays her colleague Julian Brooks, both turn in serviceable performances, as does an ensemble cast that includes Noma Dumezweni as Tessa’s mother, June, and Toheeb Jimoh as her younger brother, Johnny. But the overstuffed script leaves little room for the performances to soar.

In the film adaptation of “She Said,” which chronicles the rigorous New York Times investigation of Harvey Weinstein that helped propel the #MeToo movement into worldwide prominence, there’s a scene I’ve thought about often since first seeing the film in 2022. Samantha Morton plays former Miramax assistant Zelda Perkins, who sits in a café with reporter Jodi Kantor and recounts Weinstein’s behavior, the alleged sexual assault of her colleague Rowena Chiu, and the punishing nondisclosure agreement that followed. Morton’s performance is raw yet matter-of-fact, the emotion of something long buried pushing its way back to the surface.

There is something about that scene that nails the nuance of being gutted by the crimes of powerful, entitled men. There is no visual reenactment of the alleged assault. Yet watching a seasoned woman open the vault of her past again, hoping this time the telling might make a difference, lands with force.

Does anyone benefit from watching a woman get raped? Or, more precisely, who exactly benefits from seeing the fictional depiction of a rape? Curiously, “Prima Facie” doesn’t appear to have thought through these pivotal questions in a story about survival in the wake of sexual assault and thus lacks the requisite answers it would need to have a real emotional effect on the viewer.

I watched a rape scene, and I felt nothing. Beyond being a blow to the psyche, I felt the disquiet of knowing what I was supposed to feel but not of knowing what the movie wanted me to believe about what happened. It’s emblematic of a film that has its moments — Erivo’s searing courtroom monologue stands out — but doesn’t ultimately stand up to the weight of what it depicts.

In the rape scene, the live action is intercut with flashes of staged broken glass against black and the words in Tessa’s own head. I could see the perpetrator more easily than I could the victim. The film mostly stays on Tessa’s face, which lets some of her humanity come through in the midst of the act. But the care required to render melanated skin with dimension onscreen was painfully absent, leaving the viewer quite literally grasping in the dark.

“Prima Facie” started as a successful play, then became a novel, and is now a film that, speaking of melanin, casts Erivo, a Black woman, as Tessa Ensler. The movie explicitly positions this adaptation as expanding the source material’s examination of gender and class to include race. The film shows how class shapes Tessa, for example, in how she makes a point of thanking the cleaner at her law firm, whom her colleagues treat like a walking trash receptacle. We see Tessa’s family: her proud mother June, played by Dumezweni; her rough-around-the-edges but hardworking younger brother Johnny, played by Jimoh; and his partner, who is pregnant with their first child. But even with each actor doing their job, the family dynamic feels forced, lacking the lived-in familiarity that perhaps a few more rehearsals might have cured. More significantly, throughout the movie, we never actually experience Tessa or anyone in her family acknowledging Blackness, theirs or anyone else’s. The film instead passively constructs Tessa’s world as a colorblind one, in which racial difference simply never comes up. It even borders on stereotype in the way that it reaches for the low-hanging fruit of portraying Johnny as prone to violence and bad behavior.

Ultimately, “Prima Facie” is a film about the failures of a system that demands women prove their experiences. Unfortunately, it seems unable to trust either its protagonist or its audience without supplying proof, explanation, and justification at every turn.

Grace: C-

“Prima Facie” premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.