Chilean director Sebastián Lelio's solidly riveting new film, “The Wonder,” is set in 19th century post-famine Ireland, which aligns with the trappings of its source material: the author's 2016 novel of “ Room”, Emma Donoghue. That sounds obvious, but when the film opens, it's not a rain-lashed field, but a brightly lit modern soundstage with scaffolding around what appears to be a boxy house set, and a woman's voice telling us. says we're about to watch a movie. She hopes that we give in to the illusion, because she, she says, "we are nothing without stories."
In fact, cinema is both a challenge of belief and an opportunity to join the great narrative that is humanity. So every movie is possibly, yes, a marvel. But few draw attention to it, as if the imaginary audience were culture-hungry innocents or alien beings, not well-laid-back Netflix subscribers.
Director: Sebastián Lelio
Writers: Emma Donoghue, Sebastián LelioAlice Birch
Stars: Florence Pugh, Tom Burke, Kíla Lord Cassidy
Sure, the beginning is arc, and it's cheesy, but it's not some pointless gimmick. What Lelio and Donoghue (as coadaptor with Alice Birch) clearly believe is that their Brechtian device, which gives way when the camera finally pushes back in time through a period costumed ship's hold, is a potent way to connect with La English nurse Lib Wright (Florence Pugh), travels to Ireland and reckons with her own peculiar invitation to the unreal: a healthy-looking 11-year-old Irish girl who claims she hasn't eaten a scrap of food in four months, only "manna". from heaven." Lib has been hired by a committee of male elders to monitor Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy) for two weeks and offer their assessment of the girl's veracity.
Trained on the battlefields of the Crimean War, but not entirely powerless in the face of her own vulnerabilities and needs, Lib sees her unusual caretaker task, shared in turns with a nun and inevitably imposed on a pious and scrutinized family, as a investigation (are you eating in secret? ) and a campaign to break such a severe fast.
But the determined men, who include a doctor (Toby Jones), a priest (Ciarán Hinds) and a landowner (Brian F. O'Byrne), are less concerned with finding out the facts than with proof of the miraculous that follows. of a historic famine. Also flitting through town is a nosy but attractively rational big-city journalist (Tom Burke), who Lib must decide is an ally or an obstacle to determining the authenticity of a "miracle girl"—and maybe something else. .
As a mystery that explores the limits of faith and reason in the tightest corners of a society, anchored by a benevolent skeptic who would rather help a child than expose the fault lines of a community's repression, "The Wonder" it undeniably resonates in these confusing times. about belief, fact and manipulation.
Anna's lonely, culturally reinforced sanctity (heartfelt yet troubling) and Lib's commitment to her reminded me of a phrase journalist Rachel Aviv coined for her powerful recent book ("Strangers To Us") on mental health and one's own narratives. : what she calls the “psychic inner grounds”. It also aptly depicts Ari Wegner's shifting, tactile cinematography, in which a damp, lonely house on a harsh plain is like a mind at the outer edges of experience, while bursts of color (wet greens, purple heather, the glow of a fire) become breaths from the gloom
And yet "The Wonder" can be bumpy, as too often it seems to be about itself, not allowing us to get into it. Primed for theatrics by that opening, we get something much more staged rather than probed, targeted rather than expressed. Aside from Pugh's strong and clever portrayal of a minefield-like quest for truth, and Cassidy's whispering, dominantly enigmatic burial shroud, Lelio, known for his generous focus on a single lead character (“A Fantastic Woman,” "Gloria"), seems disinterested in the other actors' roles as living, breathing parts of a community he helped create, is still shaping and could decide the fate of a young girl.
Lib, of course, has a different notion of Anna's fate, which is what triggers the nervous tension in the gothic thriller's well-handled resolution and theme of moral responsibility. “The Wonder” may not ultimately describe itself, but in its admiration for the mysteries of storytelling and self-preservation, articulated at the beginning but shown in the contours of its ending, there is something worthwhile. contemplate.
Watch The Wonder 2022 Movie Trailer
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