An unhappy bride plotting others' downfalls, the 19th-Century anti-heroine is one of the greatest roles for women ever written – and as new film Hedda is released, she remains controversial.

"These impulses come over me all of a sudden, and I cannot resist them," confesses Hedda Gabler, the title character of Henrik Ibsen's 1891 play. Moments earlier, her friend and confidant Judge Brack approaches her lavish house – and she fires a pistol at him for her own amusement. Dodging the bullets and making his way safely inside, the judge tells her in a tete-a-tete: "You are not really happy – that is at the bottom of it." Hedda responds: "I know of no reason why I should be – happy. Perhaps you can give me one?"

Warning: This article contains mentions of suicide.

A discontented new bride, already feeling trapped and stifled within her loveless marriage – and plotting others' downfalls to distract from her own fraught existence – Ibsen's iconic anti-heroine continues to fascinate and divide. Hedda is often nicknamed the "female Hamlet" because of her mercurial nature and vast, perhaps fathomless, complexity, and the fact that the character has long been considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, stage roles for women ever written.

Her latest screen incarnation arrives in US cinemas this week: a queer reimagining of Ibsen's play, simply titled Hedda, from director Nia DaCosta (The Marvels, Candyman). It transplants the story to England in the 1950s – "the era of great pretending," as its lead Tessa Thompson tells the BBC – while gender-swapping the key role of Hedda's former lover Ejlert Løvborg to make her a woman, Eileen (Nina Hoss).

"Hedda is a master of pretending and affect," Thompson says. "One of the things that I really appreciate about English culture – and delight in – is its manners. The 1950s in particular was a time when people were going to elocution classes, [learning] how to [fold] the napkin just so and what to do with your gloves. There was an echelon of society that felt very mannered.

"Hedda is a woman who wants access to society, wealth and status. In this case, that has to do with proximity to those things," Thompson adds. Her role here is re-envisioned as the illegitimate, mixed-race daughter of the deceased General Gabler – resulting in a slippery exploration of desire, femininity and fate, involving various strata of power such as gender, race and class.

In another change, unlike the original play, the film unravels over the course of one night, as Hedda hosts a decadent and dastardly soirée. "She's someone who really wants everyone's animals to come out," DaCosta tells the BBC. "And she's someone who is, without maybe really knowing it, a wonderer, a questioner. She questions everything. The way she does that is quite violent and destructive."

In the 13 years since Ibsen's play first premiered at the Königliches Residenz-Theater in Munich, the landscape for women’s rights has changed dramatically. The Norwegian playwright penned his claustrophobic psychodrama before the women's suffrage movements of the 19th and 20th Century had gained momentum, but his story seemed to predict the social upheaval they would soon precipitate. At the play's epicentre is a woman fed up with the strictures of a patriarchal society – a situation which still rings true for many in the modern day. The play's continual reinvention is testament to its contemporary resonance.

But even as societal norms have shifted, and sympathy for women in Hedda's knotty predicament might have grown, the character continues to divide opinion. We first meet Hedda upon her return from her honeymoon with new husband George Tesman, an academic with little interest in anything beyond his books. Simultaneously, her old beau Løvborg – a........

© BBC