Would it have worked if they had leaned into Anne's awfulness to the point that she became funny too? Obviously, not as a Persuasion adaptation (that is not Austen's Anne!), but at least as a movie? Maybe not as a movie that I personally would have liked (I like to have at least one character that I actually, well, like), but it might have functioned on its own terms... Awful!Anne gets over boring Captain Wentworth and runs off with Henry Golding.

We actually discussed turning the movie into a drinking game - take a drink every time Anne addresses the camera! - but she addresses the camera so often that we probably would have been unconscious by the end, so.