Review: The Wonder

Sebastián Lelio’s eerie new film The Wonder, based on Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel of the same name, is a captivating watch. It is understated yet atmospheric, and, aside from the strange opening and closing scenes, largely unpretentious. It begins not in 1860s Ireland, where the majority of the film takes place, but in a present-day film studio. A disembodied voice (Niamh Algar) tells us that what we are about to watch is a fiction, but that the characters unequivocally believe in their reality. There is another breaking of the fourth wall later in the film, and then again at the end when the final scene pans back out to the film studio in a clumsy attempt at symbolic bookending. These moments are perhaps meant to lend the film a haunting, ambiguous quality, but in fact they feel unnecessary and clunky. It is the main body of the film that actually delivers the uncanniness that the more unconventional elements fail to. 

It is 1862, and rural Ireland is still suffering from the aftereffects of the Great Famine of the 1840s. An English nurse, Lib (Florence Pugh), is summoned to a small village in which a girl is said to have remained miraculously healthy after not eating for four months. She has become something of a spectacle, and the town has asked Lib, along with a nun, to watch the girl in shifts. They are to report back with any explanations, but not interfere. Eleven year old Anna (newcomer Kila Lord Cassidy) is poised, calm and apparently completely fine, despite her lack of sustenance. The relationship between her and Lib is one of the highlights of the film; a touching and sometimes amusing portrayal of a friendship between two people dealing with grief. 

The film builds slowly but effortlessly, a quiet fury lurking beneath the subdued surface. Shots of the wild Irish moorland are interposed between scenes of Lib eating. There is something significant in this; Lib seems to be constantly eating. At one point, the journalist (Tom Burke) that she befriends jokes that she is eating for both herself and Anna, the starving girl. The English nurse eats, whilst watching an Irish girl who doesn’t, in a subtle but pictorial presentation of colonial power. The Wonder draws on the eternal conflict between science and religion to illustrate the power of religious mania, offering a critical portrayal without demonising those who get swept up by it. Florence Pugh manages the perfect balance of understanding and frustration with Lib, who attempts to respect the views of those around her whilst gradually losing patience with their fanatical and ultimately dangerous ideas. If there is one thing I would advise when watching The Wonder, it would be to try to see it at the cinema. Florence Pugh herself said that it is a film made for the big screen. She is right: I was busy and settled for a Netflix viewing, and although I thoroughly enjoyed the film, it is one that would definitely benefit from the silence and darkness of a cinema. If, like me, you have limited time for a cinema trip, don’t be put off. The Wonder is incredibly absorbing regardless and still very much worth a watch.

Featured Image Credit: The New York Times