Worth: $16.00
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Cast:
Florence Pugh, Kíla Lord Cassidy, Tom Burke, Toby Jones, Ciarán Hinds, Brían F. O’Byrne, Josie Walker, David Wilmot, Elaine Cassidy
Intro:
… a chilling examination of how the innocent can be exploited by systems more powerful than them …
Sebastián Lelio (Gloria, Disobedience, A Fantastic Woman) opens The Wonder on a sound stage where Niamh Algar narrates that the audience is about to watch a film in which “The people you are about to meet, the characters, believe in their stories with complete devotion.” Lelio’s choice to point out that we are watching a constructed reality is ultimately redundant – the film itself argues about reality and belief convincingly enough to render Lelio’s “honest trickery” an unnecessary device. He returns occasionally to breaking the fourth wall in the film, and the ending also reiterates the audience has watched a fiction, one that Algar’s narration suggests takes one’s breath away.
Indeed, The Wonder adapted from Emma Donoghue’s novel of the same name by Alice Birch (Lady Macbeth) and Lelio, is filled with moments where breathing becomes difficult. A historical mystery set in West Ireland in 1862, a place that still carries the scars of the great famine of the 1840s, evolves into a robust examination of religious faith vs. logic but also extends itself to the carelessness of the British Empire in its treatment of the poor and dispossessed.
Lib Wright (Florence Pugh) is an English nurse dispatched to the rural Irish town to watch over a fasting girl. The phenomenon of fasting girls goes back as far as the middle ages and saw a re-emergence in periods where famine had struck a region.
Lib, a Nightingale (veteran nurse of the Crimean War), keeps herself grounded in the reality of what she can do as a bastion of science. The panel of men who have summoned her each have a reason for wanting the eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell (Kíla Lord Cassidy) to be an authentic fasting girl. For the religiously inclined, including the priest, Father Thaddeus (Ciarán Hinds) and landowner John Flynn (Brían F. O’Byrne), having a new Irish saint from their village would attract worldwide attention (not to mention profit). For the pseudo-science obsessed Dr McBrearty (Toby Jones), the idea that the human body can in some manner live without food as sustenance means that he is more concerned with Anna as an experiment who he can write about in medical journals than he is for her actual health. Only the local inn owner Seán Ryan (David Wilmot) sees it as a scam that must be uncovered.
The rules of the watch are that Lib must monitor Anna medically and ensure that the child is indeed not eating (by the time Lib arrives in the town Anna has only tasted ‘Manna from heaven’ and has shown no symptoms of starvation). She shares the watch with Sister Michael (Josie Walker) in shifts and the two are not to confer or pass on any information about what they observe.
When Lib reaches the sod farmer’s cottage, she is greeted with suspicion by the O’Connell family, including Anna’s mother Rosaline (Elaine Cassidy, playing mother to her real-life daughter Kíla) and Anna’s aunt Kitty (Niamh Algar). The family have agreed to the watch, but they resent the Englishwoman in their home. Anna is already receiving pilgrims, declaring her a miracle and a wonder, offering coin to the family, who don’t want payment – anything that is offered goes straight into the poor box for the Church. If they don’t want payment, what do they want? The answer is more complex and darker than can be imagined. Lib soon stops all visitors to Anna and also keeps the family away from her.
Anna is a “sincere” child who bonds quickly with Lib. There is a certain playfulness to their interactions that speaks of a growing fondness between the two. Anna plays with cards of saints the way another child would play with toys. Her faith is unshakable but within it is a deep well of self-punishment. She recites a prayer for her brother who has “passed over” and even as she begins to become weaker as the effects of starvation begin to show, she is fervently committed to finishing her sacrament.
Lib carries with her an unspoken grief; she has told all who ask that she is a widow, but a deeper wound lives in her heart. At night, she conducts a laudanum induced ritual that echoes a form a dark prayer. When she meets returned local man, now world travelled journalist, William Byrne (Tom Burke), she is frosty with him as she sees yet another man trying to take advantage of a child’s suffering. William’s family died in the famine, but he was away, and he too carries scars. Eventually the two bond and she allows William some access to Anna. The relationship between Lib and William turns into a romance, which is underwhelming and unlikely. Two damaged souls taking comfort in each other is understandable; but Pugh and Burke can’t sell the emotion.
Anna is dying and Lib must decide to act. The council who appointed her refuse to let her interfere in any manner, and even when she has solved the mystery of how Anna survived for four months without food, they dismiss her findings. Anna refuses to be saved and her family will not intervene – Anna made them promise on her birthday and the day of her first communion that they would not force her to eat.
Lelio’s film is a dark, gothic, mystery that is heightened by the astounding cinematography of Australian Ari Wegner (The Power of the Dog). Ireland feels unrelentingly bleak, a place of unspeakable horrors, and considering the famine that preceded the action in the film, horror is appropriate. Lelio’s regular collaborator Matthew Herbert delivers a score that is in keeping with the dour mood of the piece.
To say at this stage that Florence Pugh is an exceptional actor is unnecessary. She imbues Lib with the fortitude and intelligence the woman would have required to make the choices she does in the film. Supressing her rage with a corrupt establishment in one scene and then transitioning to a loving caregiver in another – Pugh carries the film as emotionally competently as we have come to expect. Kíla Lord Cassidy is heart-rending as the sweet but tortured Anna, a child who fears eternal damnation and is willing to die to erase herself.
Lelio’s film has rough edges; some characters are distinctly under written, and the framing device isn’t required. If he trusted that the story was enough to get across the themes without needing to remind us that we all believe stories and sometimes that is to our detriment, the film would be allowed to sit with the audience without added didacticism.
The Wonder, even with its flaws, is a chilling examination of how the innocent can be exploited by systems more powerful than them, and an angry rebuke against an Empire that saw children as disposable for their needs.