The clash between science and superstition, and the endless horrors inflicted on women’s bodies in the name of religious faith, are key themes of Chilean director Sebastian Lelio’s lavish literary adaptation The Wonder. Starring Florence Pugh as an English nurse fighting for empirical truth amidst the fake news and hokey mysticism of 19th century Ireland, this polished Netflix original is based on the 2016 novel by Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue.
Lelio’s third English-language feature also marks a slight shift towards mainstream frocks-and-bonnets convention from a director who previously won plaudits and Oscars with sparky contemporary dramas like Gloria (2013) (later remade as Gloria Bell), A Fantastic Woman (2017) and Disobedience (2017), though all these films are united by defiant, rebellious female protagonists. This lightly Gothic mystery boasts a stellar cast and high production gloss, even if it ultimately feels more like a deluxe exercise in style than a personal passion project. Currently earning positive buzz on its introductory run of big-screen festival premieres, The Wonder is screening in official competition at San Sebastian this week ahead of its autumn streaming debut.
Donoghue is best known for her 2010 novel Room, which spawned an Oscar-winning 2015 film starring Brie Larson. Though outwardly a very different narrative, The Wonder is another horror-tinged domestic thriller touching on similar themes of abused children, coercive adults and stifled female agency. The story is a fictionalised case study of the historically real “fasting girls” phenomenon stretching back to the 16th century, in which young women claimed to miraculously survive without food for months, sometimes even years. Often these apparent miracles had a religious dimension, while many were later exposed as money-making scams. Donoghue was closely involved with Lelio’s film, as co-writer and executive producer.
Fasting girls were not a specifically Irish phenomenon, but Donoghue sets the story in her native Ireland in 1862, lending it an extra charged hinterland of Catholic superstition about saints and martyrs, as well as playing on the still-raw memory of the Great Famine of the late 1840s which killed around a million people, led to mass emigration, and hastened the end of British colonial rule. The English heroine is depicted here as constantly eating while the Irish characters barely touch their food, which is surely no accident.
Pugh covers the full emotional spectrum as Lib Wright, a pragmatic British nurse with battlefield experience and tragic secrets, who is summoned to a remote Irish village for the task of playing expert witness to Anna (impressive newcomer Kila Lord Cassidy, convincingly ethereal and slightly eerie), an 11-year-old girl who has apparently eaten nothing for four months. The whiskery committee of elders who hired Lib include Anna’s doctor (Toby Jones), who has a number of comically fanciful theories abut her freakish nutritional needs, and the local priest (Ciaran Hinds), a wintry tombstone of implacable faith eager to find some hint of divine intervention at work.
Though dreamy and distracted, Anna appears physically healthy and suspiciously well-fed To Lib. “I don’t need to eat,” the girl explains, “I live on manna from heaven”. She is also mourning a dead brother, obsessively reciting prayers that she believes will secure him a place in heaven. Her manner is calm and beatific, but Lib rightly suspects emotional trauma runs below the surface, eventually barring the girl’s family from their daily visits.
Determined to find a plausible scientific explanation for this apparent miracle, Lib is taunted on one side by Will Byrne (Tom Burke), a roguish Irish journalist writing for the British press, who insists the girl is a “faker” and an “actress”. On the other side, her skepticism is repeatedly kept in check by the priests, physicians and community leaders, who secretly relish the prospect of Anna’s death, thus becoming “our first Saint since the Dark Ages.”
As a modern take on the horrors of history and the perils of superstition, The Wonder is an eminently digestible viewing experience. But as an emotionally engaging story of young women struggling to survive in terrible circumstances, it falls a little short, never quite shaking off its starchy air of costume-drama artifice. Perhaps this self-conscious sense of distance was part of Lelio’s and Donoghue’s intention, hence book-ending the film with a Brechtian device, pulling back to reveal a contemporary sound-stage while co-star Naihm Algar speaks directly to the audience about our deep human need to believe in stories, however true they may be.
But aside from this gently meta touch, Lelio and his team stick to a pretty standard period aesthetic of sumptuous costumes (by veteran British screen outfitter Odile Dicks-Mireaux), majestic landscapes and candlelit interiors framed like Dutch Old Master paintings. Hotshot Australian cinematographer Ari Wegner first worked with Pugh on her breakthrough film Lady Macbeth (2016), and seems to have agreed an ongoing pact to always shoot Pugh marching across rugged rural scenery in brightly coloured, mud-splattered, inappropriately glamorous gowns. A haunting, lightly experimental score by British composer Matthew Herbert features an atmospheric blend of strings, electronics and unconventional percussive effects.
Director: Sebastian Lelio
Screenwriters: Emma Donoghue, Alice Birch, Sebastian Lelio, based on the novel by Donoghue
Cast: Florence Pugh, Kila Lord Cassidy, Tom Burke, Ciaran Hinds, Toby Jones, Niamh Algar, Elaine Cassidy
Producers: Ed Guiney, Tessa Ross, Andrew Lowe, Juliette Howell
Cinematography: Ari Wegner
Editing: Kristina Hetherington
Production designer: Grant Montgomery
Costume designer: Odile Dicks-Mireaux
Music: Matthew Herbert
Production companies: House Productions (UK), Element Productions (Ireland), Screen Ireland (Ireland)
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (Official Selection)
In English
108 minutes
