Take a first look at Flo­rence Pugh in peri­od piece The Wonder

The crowd-pleas­ing suc­cess of Black Wid­ow has fur­ther cement­ed Flo­rence Pugh​’s rep­u­ta­tion as one of her generation’s pre­em­i­nent movie stars, a wave that many have been on since she first wowed in Lady Mac­beth back in 2015. She’ll keep that momen­tum going next year with a lead­ing role in Olivia Wilde​’s sopho­more direc­to­r­i­al effort Don’t Wor­ry Dar­ling, as well as anoth­er project with an even high­er pres­tige quotient.

Today, Dead­line ran the first pho­to of Pugh in the upcom­ing dra­ma The Won­der, to be direct­ed by Sebastián Lelio of the Acad­e­my Award-win­ning A Fan­tas­tic Woman, Dis­obe­di­ence, and both Glo­ria as well as its Amer­i­can remake Glo­ria Bell. Fans of Lady Mac­beth will be pleased to see Pugh back in peri­od garb, cast­ing a severe glance across a weath­er-beat­en land­scape under a cloudy sky – that is, her wheelhouse.

In the adap­ta­tion of Room author Emma Donoghue’s 2016 nov­el, she’ll por­tray a trav­el­ing nurse named Lib Wright in the Irish Mid­lands cir­ca 1859, where she’s come to a vil­lage to inves­ti­gate a strange mal­a­dy. A young girl claims to have sur­vived with­out eat­ing for a span of months, cre­at­ing a stir and minia­ture media cir­cus around the phe­nom­e­non, and things soon piv­ot into a psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller between the two.

The oth­er major bul­let point of the Dead­line item was the assem­bly of a cast to join Pugh, a strong line­up of the UK and Ireland’s finest includ­ing Cia­rán Hinds, Tom Burke, Toby Jones, Niamh Algar, Elaine Cas­sidy, Kíla Lord Cas­sidy, Der­mot Crow­ley, David Wilmot, and Brían F O’Byrne. Donoghue will adapt her own writ­ing, shar­ing the screen­play cred­it with Lelio and Alice Birch (the British play­wright who gave us Lady Macbeth).

The plot out­line has a basis in his­to­ry, the odd occur­rence of ​“fast­ing girls” hav­ing spread across Europe in the Vic­to­ri­an era, some observers going so far as to claim the eschew­ing of food imbued the girls with extra­or­di­nary reli­gious or oth­er­wise super­nat­ur­al pow­ers. It’s a curi­ous foot­note of his­to­ry under-explored on screen, and a fit­ting sub­ject for a film that will give Pugh some real meat to sink her teeth into.