The Wonder | Little White Lies

The Won­der

02 Nov 2022

Woman in blue dress and grey shawl stands amidst old wooden crosses in grassy field, with mountains in the background.
Woman in blue dress and grey shawl stands amidst old wooden crosses in grassy field, with mountains in the background.
3

Anticipation.

Lelio swings from high to low in quality, but Florence Pugh comes alive in period drama.

4

Enjoyment.

The du Maurier-lite narrative by Emma Donoghue scintillates in the lush Irish countryside.

3

In Retrospect.

Devices that work in books don’t always translate well to film.

Sebastián Lelio’s 19th-cen­tu­ry dra­ma dwells in the goth­ic-bucol­ic as a nurse watch­es over a girl who has sur­vived months with­out food.

The open­ing titles of The Won­der are super­im­posed over the exte­ri­or frame­work of a stu­dio set. The cam­era pans across an emp­ty ware­house while a nar­ra­tor asks us to remem­ber the arti­fice of cin­e­ma when we enter its worlds, before land­ing on the room in which the sto­ry begins. The device comes from Emma Donoghue’s 2016 nov­el of the same title, a far-cry from her 2010 claus­tro­pho­bic thriller Room’.

Here that ter­rain is the Irish coun­try­side to which we ven­ture with Nurse Wright (Flo­rence Pugh) to inves­ti­gate a mys­te­ri­ous child called Anna (Kíla Lord Cas­sidy) who has sup­pos­ed­ly gone with­out food for four months. The ques­tion of Anna’s health in spite of star­va­tion has led a pan­el of vil­lage elders to canon­ise the 11-year-old as a saint, per­sist­ing in their con­vic­tions even after Nurse Wright warns them the child may die. What ensues is a bat­tle of reli­gios­i­ty and sec­u­lar­ism as old as time.

The sim­plic­i­ty of the nar­ra­tive allows those strands of argu­ment to per­co­late effec­tive­ly. In this sense, The Won­der feels akin to the des­o­late peri­od dra­mas of Daphne du Mau­ri­er, espe­cial­ly Jamaica Inn’. Pugh and Cas­sidy make a cap­ti­vat­ing dou­ble act in the child’s game of cat-and-mouse, well-accom­pa­nied by the lurk­ing pres­ence of Tom Burkes poten­tial­ly devi­ous jour­nal­ist. It’s a refresh­ing return to nat­u­ral­is­tic form for Pugh fol­low­ing her recent block­buster run, rel­ish­ing in the mul­ti-lay­ered gowns designed by Odile Dicks-Mireaux.

But The Won­der is most cap­ti­vat­ing in its look – the misty green hues of Ire­land filmed beau­ti­ful­ly by cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Ari Weg­n­er. Her abil­i­ty to cap­ture the vast­ness of land­scape earned her an Oscar nod for Jane Cam­pi­ons The Pow­er of the Dog, using that scale again to cap­ture a qui­et­ly ter­ri­fy­ing sense of iso­la­tion. It’s a shame that the ter­rain Weg­n­er cap­tures isn’t left to stand on its own, occa­sion­al­ly pulling back to the film’s open­ing trick­ery. It is sur­pris­ing that such a lit­er­ary frame­work has been retained in the screen­play, penned by Donoghue along­side Alice Birch, whose pre­vi­ous adap­ta­tions include Niko­lai Leskov for William Oldroyd’s 2016 film Lady Mac­beth, and direc­tor Sebastián Lelio. Per­haps such post­mod­ernist ques­tion­ing is Lelio’s way of keep­ing one foot in his more art­house past, which earned him an Oscar for A Fan­tas­tic Woman.

We return to the stu­dio at the end of The Won­der, now being remind­ed that we must come out of the cin­e­mat­ic world and return to our own. The result is jar­ring, leav­ing one inca­pable of sus­pend­ing dis­be­lief enough to ful­ly enter the fab­ric of the screen. If that is the point, it is patro­n­is­ing­ly obvi­ous in a way that under­mines the more com­pelling the­o­log­i­cal ques­tions posed by the nar­ra­tive proper.

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