THE WONDER ★★★
(M) 108 minutes
Florence Pugh, by now, is some kind of star, but a hard one to keep in focus – a shape-shifter, rather than a consistent screen personality we can follow from one role to the next.
Florence Pugh shape-shifts again as Lib Wright, a nurse investigating a mysterious starving girl, in The Wonder.
Still, she seems to gravitate to period pieces with a progressive slant, including the recent Don’t Worry Darling, set in a cartoonish version of squeaky-clean 1950s suburbia. In contexts like this, her characters can be outwardly submissive while retaining a degree of freedom on the immediate physical level, redolent in turn of an inner strength.
It feels quite natural to see her traipsing over the fields of 19th century Ireland in The Wonder, the hem of her sky-blue skirt getting gradually more soiled. Surely, it’s only a matter of time before she teams up with Jane Campion, who more or less invented this sort of thing in The Piano.
Here, the director is Sebastian Lelio (Disobedience), adapting a 2016 novel by Emma Donoghue. Pugh plays Lib, an intrepid English nurse summoned to the Irish Midlands to tend to a young peasant girl named Anna, played with impressive control by 13-year-old newcomer Kila Lord Cassidy.
For months, Anna has refused to eat, yet she still has colour in her cheeks, claiming to subsist on “manna from heaven”. Many in this very Catholic community are convinced they’re in the presence of a miracle; a local doctor (Toby Jones) has theories about magnetism. But can Lib, keeping watch day and night, uncover the truth?
A remarkable Kíla Lord Cassidy stars as Anna O’Donnell, with Tom Burke as Will Byrne, and Pugh as Lib in The Wonder.
It’s an intriguing premise, though suspense fades once it becomes clear the mystery won’t be solved until the climax. Meanwhile, Lib has a certain amount of detective work to occupy her, along with an opium habit and a love interest played by Tom Burke from The Souvenir, who has the kind of fleshy, mildly dejected face that looks natural framed by mutton chops.
Basically, the film is a waiting game, with Lelio, a sophisticated technician, using every available trick to keep us engaged. A framing device “breaks the fourth wall” in the manner of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, though only half-heartedly. More effective are the discordant horns and banshee wails of Matthew Herbert’s score, which recalls some modernist orchestral pieces Martin Scorsese sampled in Shutter Island, with perhaps a dash of Enya.
Mainly what we’re asked to do is keep watch on Pugh, who is equipped to make Lib into a mystery in her own right, and to some extent does. But while the character has her share of inner turmoil, in the end she’s all too clearly positioned as an advocate for the assumed perspective of the audience, bringing reason and compassion to the benighted past.
At the same time, crucial issues are kept vague. In theory, this is centrally a drama of faith, pitting its heroine against the forces of superstition and pseudo-science. But is Lib a believing Christian, as we might expect given the place and time? What does she really think about heaven and hell?
The Wonder is in cinemas from November 10 and streams on Netflix from November 16.
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