Film

Love & Friendship

Whit Stillman adapts Jane Austen's early novella "Lady Susan" with a dry, breathless wit that owes more to drawing-room warfare than romance. Kate Beckinsale is superb as a widow who talks her way through every room she enters, manipulating in-laws, suitors and daughters alike without ever raising her voice. It's Austen with the sentiment stripped out — funnier, colder, and far more cynical than you'd expect.

TMDb rating6.0

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Metropolitan1990

Whit Stillman's debut has the exact same rhythm — overeducated people delivering devastating lines with perfect composure while quietly ruining each other's plans, just swapped from Regency drawing rooms to 1980s Manhattan debutante season.

But Its dialogue-heavy, low-budget indie style and glacial pace can feel slight if you came for costumes and plot momentum.

Metropolitan poster

Clueless1995

The same source material — Austen's social matchmaking machinery — transplanted to a Beverly Hills high school, with Cher Horowitz as a sunnier, less venomous cousin of Lady Susan running everyone's love lives.

But It's broad, bright, unapologetically '90s teen comedy — expect none of the film's period bite or moral ambiguity.

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The Favourite2018

Court intrigue, competing women scheming for power and position, and dialogue so sharp it draws blood — if you loved watching Lady Susan out-manoeuvre a room, this ups the stakes and the cruelty considerably.

But It's darker, stranger and more grotesque, with a queasy sexual undercurrent that Austen's world never touches.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Heiress1949no page yet

Both watch a woman turn the marriage market's cruelty back on the people running it — Austen's satire and this Gothic melodrama share the same cold arithmetic, just played for heartbreak instead of laughs.

Olivia de Havilland's Oscar-winning turn as a naïve heiress who learns to weaponize her own coldness — courtship, class and calculation played out with no joke to soften the blow.

But It's Hollywood classical drama with zero laughs; the tone is icy tragedy, not comedy, and it takes its time getting there.

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Emma.2020

Autumn de Wilde's adaptation shares the same crisp, stylised comic timing and visual wit, treating Austen's plotting as something closer to farce than romance — gorgeous, quick, and very funny.

But Anya Taylor-Joy's Emma is more sympathetic than Lady Susan ever is; if you wanted pure ruthlessness, this softens considerably.

Emma. poster

Pride and Prejudice

The gold-standard Austen adaptation, slower and more sincere, for anyone who wants the marriage plot played straight — warmth, longing, and Colin Firth in wet linen instead of knives out.

But It's six hours of earnest romance with none of Lady Susan's cynicism or comic malice — tonally almost the opposite film.

Sense and Sensibility1995

Emma Thompson's script finds the same social comedy of manners but plays it tender rather than merciless, a good chaser if the film's coldness left you wanting some warmth back.

But Its sincerity and gentle humor are the direct opposite of Lady Susan's scheming — don't expect any villains this charming.

Sense and Sensibility poster

Gosford Park2001

Robert Altman's ensemble class comedy shares the same interest in watching manners conceal manipulation, with a huge cast of aristocrats and servants all quietly working an angle.

But It's a murder mystery wrapped around the social satire, with a much larger cast to track and a slower, meandering structure.

Gosford Park poster

Vanity Fair2004no page yet

Reese Witherspoon plays Becky Sharp, literature's other great social climber, clawing her way up through marriage and charm with the same delighted amorality Beckinsale brings to Lady Susan.

But It covers decades and a much bigger canvas, trading Austen's tight comic focus for sprawling historical drama.

Damsels in Distress2012no page yet

Stillman again, later and stranger — a college comedy about a clique of women "improving" everyone around them with the same blend of absurd logic and total self-assurance Lady Susan has.

But It's odder and more whimsical than anything in Austen, closer to deadpan surrealism than social satire.

Fleabag2016

Both center a woman narrating her own manipulations with total command of the room (or camera), daring you to admire her even as she wrecks lives around her.

Same weapon — a woman who talks directly to you while dismantling everyone around her — except transplanted to modern London, with grief instead of gossip driving the knives.

But It's raw, sad, sexually explicit and emotionally exposed in ways Austen never risked; the humor cuts close rather than staying at arm's length.

Fleabag poster

The Bachelor2003no page yet

Lady Susan's charm offensive is the same machine that runs a season of this show — social value auctioned off dressed as romance, minus Austen's irony to protect you from how ugly it actually looks.

Watch the exact same marriage-market chess Austen wrote about, except now it's unscripted, filmed in slow motion with rose ceremonies, and nobody bothers hiding the calculation behind the smiles.

But It's reality television at its most cynical and repetitive — no wit, no prose, just contestants performing sincerity for a rose.

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Pride & Prejudice, Emma., The Last Days of Disco