With a prosthetic nose, Nicole Kidman could be the closest figure director Stephen Daldry aspired for to be Virginia Woolf in Hollywood. Kidman is in Virginia’s worst days. Being delusional throughout the day, she keeps hearing inner voices. Her characters choke her at the writing table. It’s inevitable for one of them to die. Like the fallen bird in the garden, she doesn’t know what happens after death. She places her head next to it and feels death. Kidman is deeply into the crumbling self of Virginia Woolf and the bouts of her moody expressions in The Hours quickly unsettles the audience.

What settles Woolf is never in her control. Often, The Hours captures her bisexual instincts. Before writing her first line in the morning, Nicole comes down as if to seize some normal life around. Even the caretakers of the house frown at her crazy instructions. In a few seconds, she fails herself and gets back to her writing table. She was writing Mrs. Dalloway.

Virginia Woolf is not happy about her husband Leonard Woolf’s (Stephen Dillane) decision to shift to their countryside house. She wants to be in Sussex and breathe city life. In an exhausted, hostile mental state, she runs out to the streets and contemplates altering the fate of her characters. Why would someone have to die? Visionaries have to set the path to value life- with a rare smile, Virginia comforts her caring husband.

Later, in 1949, Laura Brown is reading Mrs. Dalloway with a heavy heart and leaving her clinging younger son with a Nanny and check-in to a hotel room and asks for a Do Not Disturb card. A sudden gush of water engulfs Brown similar to Virginia Woolf drowns herself in the Ouse River, unable to bear the weight of her void and identity crisis.

In The Hours, there is no trace of Nicole Kidman, it was Virginia Woolf herself comes alive with her severe breakdowns, anguishes, and pain. Damn real and heavy. Perfect body language and disturbing blank stares. No wonder Kidman won her first-ever Oscar for The Hours.

A must-watch Kidman performance