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. 

2022 Catch-Up: The Pale Blue Eye (15)

 The heart is a symbol or it is nothing.

Gist: The year is 1830, the place West Point military academy, New York, and world-weary detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) has been summoned to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of a young cadet. A verdict of suicide is rendered problematic by the fact that the corpse has been mutilated in macabre fashion. Senior officers want the mystery solved swiftly, but are perturbed when Landor enlists the help of a young private, with a poetic turn of mind, named Edgar Allan Poe. And as the truth unfolds, it proves as dark and twisted as anything of which young Poe's literary imagination will ever conceive.

Juice: The Pale Blue Eye is a snowbound January treat from director Scott Cooper, one best watched by a fire warm enough to thaw its icy Gothic chill. West Point in winter is a beautifully bleak setting for this morbid tale of human frailty and evil, the uniform blue of the cadets standing out against the crisp white backdrop. It's down to stark and spectacular camerawork from the sure hand of Masanobu Takayanagi, complimented by Howard Shore's epic lamentation of a score. The performances are chilly too. Christian Bale is at his most gruff and contained as the damaged detective, while a coterie of great character actors - Timothy Spall, Simon McBurney, Toby Jones - populate the military command with frosty skepticism. Lucy Boynton, meanwhile, is all pale reserve as a focal point of several characters' romantic attention, and Gillian Anderson delivers an altogether more gregarious and enjoyably scenery-chewing performance as the doctor's wife. But it's Harry Melling who stands out as the theatrical and morbidly romantic young Poe, adding humanity to the proceedings along with greater warmth (albeit a mite creepy) than all the ale he downs with Bale. The lad has come a long way from the Dursley household in Harry Potter, and his portrayal of the burgeoning literary genius is a big step along his road to acting greatness.

If the film has a drawback, it's the slow and meandering mid-section, one that pushes the story beyond a two-hour running time and loses along the way some of the plot momentum so briskly established in the opening. Compensation comes in the form of sheer melodrama in the movie's final stages, which deliver more plot layers than the snow blanketing West Point. This includes a twist you'll either embrace completely or dismiss as too damn much. I chose the former.

Judgement: 7.5/10. Director Cooper is no stranger to bleak stories - his western Hostiles, again with Bales, portrayed a brutal landscape - but The Pale Blue Eye has a specifically desolate beauty to it, while spinning a tale worthy of Edgar Allan himself. The film is an especial treat for lovers of American Gothic, leaning hard as it does into influences that might have shaped the writer of The Raven and The Tell-Tale Heart. It takes its bitterly cold time, for sure, but makes it worth the while. So - throw a few extra logs on the fire, settle down with a snifter of something warming, and enjoy.