Long Day’s Journey into Night unfolds within a single April day in 1912, as the Tyrone family convenes in their Connecticut seaside retreat. Morning light filters through lace curtains (ghostly in its delicacy), hinting at both renewal and decay. Jonathan Kent adapts Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize–winning drama with minimal fanfare: David Lindsay-Abaire’s screenplay preserves the play’s structural integrity while allowing microexpressions to carry seismic emotional weight.

Cinematographer Mark Wolf frames each encounter with a stillness that feels almost surgical, positioning Mary (Jessica Lange), James (Ed Harris), Jamie (Ben Foster) and Edmund (Colin Morgan) in tableaux where silent glances speak volumes. Ilan Eshkeri’s sparse score—or absence thereof—amplifies ambient creaks and a distant foghorn, rendering the house a character itself.

Lange’s Mary drifts between lucid charm and opioid-tinted disorientation, while Harris’s James masks paternal regret beneath a veneer of theatrical pride. Foster’s...