The World to Come

Tues­day, 1 Jan­u­ary, 1856. A woman scrubs pota­toes in a sink, the water freez­ing as soon as it hits cold air. ​“With lit­tle pride, and less hope, we begin the new year,” she notes in her diary. The woman is Abi­gail (Kather­ine Water­ston), young, down­cast but faith­ful in her role as wife to farmer Dyer (Casey Affleck) in rur­al Upstate New York.

The cou­ple are mourn­ing their infant daugh­ter who has recent­ly died of diph­the­ria, the emo­tion­al fall­out from which Abi­gail records metic­u­lous­ly in her diary. The loss of her child is also the loss of Abigail’s reli­gion (she no longer attends the local Sun­day ser­vice). Instead she seeks com­fort, res­o­lu­tion and sal­va­tion in her writing.

The nar­ra­tive of Mona Fastvold’s The World to Come is framed by Abigail’s diary entries, begin­ning in the cold, hard win­ter when the charis­mat­ic Tal­lie (Vanes­sa Kir­by) and her pos­ses­sive hus­band Finney (Christo­pher Abbott) arrive to rent the neigh­bour­ing farm. As spring arrives, friend­ship blos­soms between the two women as they bond over a shared lone­li­ness and frus­tra­tion at their dai­ly drudgery.

Soon the women are neglect­ing their wife­ly duties for each other’s com­pa­ny, much to their hus­bands’ cha­grin. Tal­lie ignites a deep desire buried with­in Abi­gail and as the weath­er breaks so does the lone­ly woman’s inner frost. A qui­et­ly swoon­ing romance begins.

Fastvold teas­es out this love sto­ry care­ful­ly and then relent­less­ly. Shot on 16mm by DoP André Chemetoff, much of The World to Come is com­posed of frag­men­tary moments nar­rat­ed by Abigail’s epis­to­lary mono­logues and sound­tracked by Daniel Blum­berg ​’s emo­tive clar­inet score. At dif­fer­ent turns, the sub­lime nat­ur­al set­ting is lib­er­at­ing and claus­tro­pho­bic, lock­ing the women in their unhap­py homes or hid­ing them from pry­ing eyes.

While lyri­cal, The World to Come is far from a pret­ti­fied peri­od dra­ma as an elec­tri­fy­ing, night­mar­ish bliz­zard sequence estab­lish­es ear­ly in the film. This is a bru­tal world, one that has lit­tle time for romance, regard­less of whether it’s between hus­band and wife or woman and woman.

The film’s quar­tet of leads are superb, but Water­ston and Kir­by are mag­net­ic. Over­ly wrought dia­logue is made sup­ple by their nat­u­ral­is­tic per­for­mances, yet the words left unspo­ken – com­mu­ni­cat­ed with the curl of a lip or hard gaze – is often more com­pelling than the words in the script.

The World to Come is adapt­ed from Jim Shepard’s short sto­ry and the film’s screen­writ­ers – Shep­ard him­self along­side nov­el­ist Ron Hansen – rely almost entire­ly on Abigail’s diary entries to con­vey her emo­tion­al inte­ri­or­i­ty. The voiceover nar­ra­tion is so fre­quent and so lit­er­ary that it tends to weigh down Chemetoff’s lush imagery which seems to beg for a more nat­u­ral­is­tic and loose dra­mat­ic tenor.

Nev­er­the­less, The World to Come weaves a beguil­ing spell, told with both restraint and ecsta­sy. While the film’s les­bian romance is rad­i­cal with­in its set­ting, it’s Abigail’s ques­tions about the cen­turies of unpaid, unac­knowl­edged labour of count­less wives that feel urgent­ly mod­ern. The World to Come is a snow­globe of a film: a con­tained flur­ry of pas­sion, as mag­i­cal as it is short-lived.

The World to Come opens on lim­it­ed release in the US on 12 Feb­ru­ary, and is avail­able in the UK from 2 April.