2022 Catch-up: The Wonder (15)

 I live on manna. From Heaven.

Gist: In post-Famine rural Ireland a girl named Anna O'Donnell has seemingly gone four weeks without eating, yet without starving. Enter Florence Pugh as Elizabeth Wright, an English nurse come from the Crimean War and summoned to Ireland specifically so she can observe young Anna. Locals are calling the girl's condition a miracle, but Elizabeth, along with London reporter (Tom Burke) originally from the locality, are understandably skeptical. The truth behind the fasting girl's situation, however, may prove more haunting than either believers or dissenters could fathom.

Juice: Based on Emma Donoghue's 2016 novel, The Wonder is a film where characters clash on multiple fronts, the lines of division either explicit or merely implied. Faith versus science, Irish versus English, community patriarchs versus a female outsider - relations are complex and strained, with slim chance of common ground as the odd and secretive Anna's fate plays out. It's a finely tuned screenplay, with input from both director Sebastian Lelio and Succession writer Alice Birch, who supplied lines for Pugh in the equally bleak and windswept Lady Macbeth. 

For all the cross-currents of conflict, this is a dramatic slow-burn. Lelio is restrained in his direction, letting the story get its hooks in elsewhere. Like in the austere, perfectly lit cinematography of Ari Wegner (The Power of the Dog and - again - Lady Macbeth) and Matthew Herbert's creepily mesmerising score with its evocative, unsettling female vocals that insinuate their way right under your skin. Pugh is - no big shock - terrific, gradually exposing depths of empathy under a brittle exterior. Her chemistry with the amiably cynical Burke is a welcome counterpoint to the grimness elsewhere, and the support cast, including Ciaran Hinds and Toby Jones (he gets everywhere these days), provide additional weight. But it's relative newcomer Kila Lord Cassidy who gives the other standout performance as Anna, embodying the peculiar, otherworldly girl with enough humanity to get you fully invested in her increasingly precarious fate.

Judgement: 8/10. The Wonder deals, among other things, with the stories we tell ourselves to explain the inexplicable, the heartbreaking, or the just plain scary. That helps explain the film's strange third-wall-break framing, and just maybe the events of the final act, where all that simmering emotion pays off in ways you won't necessarily expect. While presenting a very different mystery from fellow period drama The Pale Blue Eye, it could work well as a companion piece, with both movies' chilliness - environmental and otherwise - ultimately countered by the intensity of complex human passions. At any rate, it's a lovingly crafted and affecting tale, with a further knockout turn from unstoppable Florence. Yet she's only one one of many reasons behind the film's stealthily creeping power.