Anne with an E

A Child Who Refuses to Be Quiet

There’s a moment in Anne with an E when the whole series seems to understand, with a kind of startled tenderness, that imagination can be both a defense mechanism and an act of rebellion. latestnetflix.com's take is that Anne Shirley doesn’t merely daydream; she talks her way into existence.She narrates, insists, names, revises.

In a story set in the late 1890s, that’s a radical gesture. The world around her would prefer children — especially poor, orphaned, inconvenient girls — to be seen and not heard, if seen at all. Anne refuses.

She fills the air.

What surprised me, watching this adaptation, is how often it’s less interested in the folklore of Anne Shirley than in the social mechanics of being denied personhood. Yes, this is another visit to Lucy Maud Montgomery’s beloved character, and yes, that means the series arrives with a burden no original work has to carry: everyone already knows Anne’s red hair, her temper, her metaphors, her tragic habit of turning embarrassment into opera.

But creators Moira Walley-Beckett and the series’ collaborators don’t treat the material as museum glass. They pull it into a harsher register. This Anne is not just whimsical; she’s shaped by institutional cruelty, gendered contempt, and the exhausting labor of trying to remain open-hearted in a world that keeps trying to shrink her.

That’s the conversation around the show, really. For some viewers, it was a welcome deepening of Montgomery’s novelistic world; for others, especially those attached to the sweeter, more pastoral image of Avonlea, it felt like a modernization by way of trauma. I think both responses make sense.

The series is clearly fascinated by the emotional politics of adaptation itself — what gets softened in memory, what gets restored when you stop decorating the past. It’s not a nostalgia piece, even when it looks like one. It’s more like a correction written in ink that doesn’t quite dry.

Walley-Beckett, who came to the project after work defined by sharper edges and moral pressure-cookers, gives the series a very particular rhythm. She likes the pauses after humiliation. She likes the look on a face after someone has said something small and terrible.

In Anne with an E, feeling is rarely private for long; it leaks into rooms, into meals, into school recitations, into the posture of people standing in doorways. That’s where the show is smartest. It understands that a community isn’t built only by grand declarations of principle but by everyday habits of looking away, of correcting, of taking up too much space, of deciding which children deserve patience.

The photography helps a great deal. The series can be lovely — I don’t mean prettified, which would be wrong, but attentive. The light over Prince Edward Island often looks damp and changeable, as if the weather itself is unsure whether to bless or judge the people beneath it.

Interiors are practical, but not dull; they’re places where bodies have histories. Anne’s stillness is as important as her speech. Amybeth McNulty plays her with a face that seems to be permanently negotiating between alarm and delight.