‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ review: Jessica Lange and Ed Harris power delayed adaptation

Dir: Jonathan Kent. UK/US. 2025. 109mins

Written by playwright Eugene O’Neill between 1939 and 1941, and first published posthumously in 1956, Long Day’s Journey Into Night may seem small in scale for a film — the action takes place in one house over the course of a single day in 1912 — but is a rich, rewarding Pultizer Prize-winning family drama of grief and guilt, anger and recrimination, partially based on O’Neill’s own life. It’s an actor’s dream in four acts; this latest stripped-down adaptation features Jessica Lange, Ed Harris, Ben Foster and Colin Morgan.

This material remains ripe for repeated interpretation

Jessica Lange takes the lead role of Tyrone family matriarch Mary, which resulted in an Oscar nomination for Katherine Hepburn in 1962. It’s a reprisal of her partnership with British director Jonathan Kent on the 2016 Broadway revival, which won her a Tony. Shot in Ireland in 2022, this version of Long Day’s Journey Into Night has survived the financing issues that temporariliy stopped filming, subsequent delays and a change in representation (Blue Fox took it in time for this year’s EFM) to play Glasgow Film Festival after premiering at Dublin. The cast and material alone are sufficient to attract upscale audiences, but this is a strong adaptation in and of itself. 

The play is set around Mary’s return to the family’s Connecticut seaside home after her recent treatment for opioid addiction. The rest of the Tyrone family — husband James (Harris) and sons Jamie (Foster) and Edmund (Morgan) — say they are pleased to have her back, yet they treat her with suspicion. They fear a relapse, and none are able to help when she unravels, revealing her demons, which include the long-ago death of an infant son. They would prefer her to simply keep quiet. Mary being ‘a dope fiend’, as Edmund puts it, brings shame on the family — unlike the more socially acceptable alcohol that James and Jamie use.

The festering resentment of things left unsaid fuels this play, and David Lindsay-Abaire’s unflinching, brisk screenplay traces the growing fissures in the family. This is a work set before the First World War yet written in the early years of the Second, and Kent and his cast dig into the paranoia, shifting loyalties and dark realities behind this facade of unity. Often, family members explode with a truthful, hurtful accusation, then almost immediately attempt to soothe with a rote apology. Anxiety and denial over illness and mortality — Mary is unwilling to face Edmund’s consumption diagnosis, just as James cannot comprehend his wife’s mental distress — is a recurring theme.

Every movement Lange makes as Mary seems heavy with the pain of trauma. Playing a former stage actor, Harris gives us a James who is defiantly proud, masking the weight of his own grief, while Foster finds vulnerability in the seemingly cruel and carefree older brother Jamie. As Edmund, the baby of the family, Morgan shoulders the lion’s share of the melodrama — not only is he potentially dying, he is also something of a tortured poet — but impresses in more emotional scenes with Lange.

Filming in County Wicklow, cinematographer Mark Wolf favours a traditional theatrical set-up, with meticulously composed framing and static camera, but effectively juxtaposes the wild expanse of the coastline with the hermetically sealed environment of the house – modelled on O’Neill’s own childhood home. Articulate production design from Anna Rackard fills the rooms with the familiar paraphernalia of home, yet the atmosphere is cold and oppressive. Shots of empty rooms and echoey corridors emphasise this lack of warmth and the sense of a household at war with itself. Music is scant, with the creak of floorboards, the call of distant gulls and the intrusive call of the foghorn providing an evocative, melancholy soundscape.