Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003) Review: Painted in Silence

Is Girl with a Pearl Earring worth watching?

Yes, with reservations. Girl with a Pearl Earring is one of the most visually exquisite period dramas of its decade, a film that looks like a Vermeer come to life and tells its story of unspoken attraction almost entirely through glances. Scarlett Johansson gives a quietly compelling performance with very little dialogue. The reservation is that its restraint can tip into inertia: the drama is so muted that some viewers will admire it more than they feel it.

What is Girl with a Pearl Earring about?

Girl with a Pearl Earring is set in the Dutch city of Delft in the seventeenth century. Griet (Scarlett Johansson), a young woman from a poor family, is sent to work as a maid in the crowded household of the painter Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth), where she must navigate a suspicious wife (Essie Davis), a shrewd mother-in-law (Judy Parfitt) and a household full of children and rivalries.

Griet’s natural eye for colour and light catches Vermeer’s attention, and she gradually becomes his assistant, grinding pigments and helping in the studio. Their closeness is noticed by everyone, including Vermeer’s wealthy patron (Tom Wilkinson), and it complicates Griet’s budding romance with Pieter (Cillian Murphy), a young butcher’s son. The film imagines how this relationship might have led to one of the most famous portraits in Western art.

Peter Webber directs this English-language period drama, adapted by Olivia Hetreed from Tracy Chevalier’s novel. It runs 101 minutes and received Academy Award nominations for its cinematography, art direction and costume design.

A film that looks like a painting

The film’s greatest achievement is visual. Eduardo Serra’s cinematography recreates the soft northern light of Vermeer’s interiors with astonishing precision, and many compositions echo the painter’s work: a woman at a window, light falling across a table, the quiet geometry of a Dutch room. It is not decoration for its own sake; the images teach the audience to see the way Griet learns to see.

The production design is equally careful. The Vermeer household feels cramped, cold and busy, a world of chores, gossip and tight finances, which makes the calm of the studio feel almost sacred by contrast. Alexandre Desplat’s delicate score adds to the sense of a world where emotion is carefully contained.

Johansson’s performance in glances

Johansson was still a teenager when she made the film, and her performance relies almost entirely on stillness. Griet says little, but her watchfulness and suppressed feeling are always legible, and the scenes in which she observes Vermeer at work carry more tension than most love scenes. The film understands that for a servant in her position, every look is a risk.

Colin Firth is enigmatic as Vermeer, perhaps too much so; the painter remains a closed book whose motives are hard to read. Cillian Murphy brings warmth and straightforward decency to Pieter, a man who wants Griet on simpler terms, and Tom Wilkinson makes the patron a genuinely menacing figure whose wealth gives him power over everyone in the house.

Where restraint becomes distance

The film’s commitment to understatement is both its strength and its limitation. The story is slender, and its central relationship is built on so much withheld feeling that the emotional payoff feels muted. Vermeer’s opacity leaves a hole at the film’s centre, and the household politics, while well acted, can seem repetitive. Viewers looking for a passionate love story or a detailed portrait of an artist’s life will find it thin.

Who should watch Girl with a Pearl Earring?

It is ideal for lovers of art, painting and slow, atmospheric period drama, and for anyone curious about the Dutch Golden Age. At 101 minutes it is compact, but it moves at a deliberate pace. There is little violence, some implied threat of sexual coercion and class exploitation, and nothing explicit, so it suits teenagers and adults.

If you appreciate its quiet intensity:

• Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a more passionate period drama about the charged relationship between a painter and her subject.
• The Lunchbox, another story of intimacy expressed almost entirely without words.

The verdict

Girl with a Pearl Earring is a beautifully crafted, carefully acted film that turns a single painting into a meditation on looking and longing. Its restraint keeps it at arm’s length, but for its images and Johansson’s subtle performance, it is well worth seeing.

Rating: 3.5/5