The Wonder is now in select theaters, and will stream on Netflix on Nov. 16.
Director Sebastián Lelio has made some remarkable films, including Spanish-language drama Glora, its English-language remake Gloria Bell, and his tremendous 2018 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winner A Fantastic Woman. Each one is both grounded and imaginative, with a lived-in, familiar quality that makes up for any lack of visual embellishments. Unfortunately his latest film, The Wonder, loses its familiarity in service of a mystery presented un-mysteriously, about a 19th century English nurse who travels to Ireland to investigate a miracle, unfurling a tale of deeply held beliefs and even deeper regrets that read like demons on paper, but play out as mere inconveniences in practice.
The year is 1862. It’s been barely over a decade since the Great Famine, and battlefield nurse Lib Wright (Florence Pugh) has been summoned to a small Irish town. She’s been tasked, by the township’s elders, with watching over a young girl named Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy) who, according to some, hasn’t eaten since her 11th birthday, four whole months ago. Lib’s job is to observe and verify, though her sense of duty compels her otherwise — if only for Anna’s safety. The Wonder isn’t really concerned with the “how” of the girl’s survival as it is with the “why.”
Made from a screenplay by Emma Donoghue (which she adapted from her own novel, much as she did with the movie Room), The Wonder is framed as a story about stories, opening on a modern day film set before stepping into the past. There’s even voiceover that makes reference to the importance of stories and the way people cling to them, setting up a tale of fanatical religious belief that manifests as overseeing a girl all but starving herself to death just years after a famine. Surely there must be reasons for this — whether good or bad ones, they’re reasons Anna and her family must believe in all the same — and in trying to discern these motives, Lib ends up exposing parts of her own past, and her own tragic story, which inform her concerns.
The problem is that these stories (and the film’s own musings about storytelling) are far more compelling in theory than in execution. While young Cassidy delivers a spellbinding performance as a girl claiming to survive off only “manna from heaven,” Pugh’s character comes off more empty than reserved, owing to a visual approach that’s far too restrained for a story of lingering doubts that conjure horrible thoughts and memories. The cast includes heavy hitters like Toby Jones and Ciaran Hinds, who play members of a board convening to debate Lib’s duties, but they’re made to feel like an afterthought. So much of the experience of The Wonder is akin to watching filmed rehearsals in pre-production, with little by way of staging, movement, or rhythm to enhance what is clearly a very loaded text, given the facts which are eventually unearthed about several central characters.
That’s all they are, though. Just facts, despite warm, low-light photography by Ari Wegner that seeks to make the story intriguing, and creeping, jagged musical tones by Matthew Herbert, which are filled with distorted voices, and which seek to dislodge your sense of equilibrium. Rather than using staging, framing, and motion to complement these forces, Lelio decides to withhold, in favor of a more observational approach — but what he’s observing is rarely expressive enough to speak for itself.
The Wonder is the rare film where you might get more out of reading a plot summary.
Lib, and the movie, both meander through what should be a powerful (and powerfully self-reflexive) tale about the way sticking to stories, beliefs, and rituals can both shackle and liberate. Even the handful of moments where faith is challenged, through dialogue, result in little by way of characters or the audience feeling shaken. And when the story finally takes minor turns — calling them “twists” or even “swerves” would be generous — it’s often difficult to tell which moments are meant to be emotional highs, and which ones are the lulls or the connective tissue. After a while, it all feels flattened into a homogenous mass, seldom stirring, and almost never instilling curiosity, let alone emotional intrigue.
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