The story of Sebastian Lelio’s The Wonder is all about a story. The film centers on Elizabeth Wright (Florence Pugh), an English nurse who journeys to an Irish village on a curious mission. She’s been asked to watch Anna O’Donnell (Kíla Lord Cassidy), an 11-year-old girl who’s apparently gone without food for four months. When Elizabeth meets Anna, though, she finds the girl markedly unpained—in bodily terms, at least—and Anna tells her that she lives on manna from heaven. “And how does that feel?” Elizabeth asks. To which Anna responds, “Full.”
Elizabeth’s task, set by an all-male village committee, is to simply watch, alternating eight-hour shifts with a nun, Sister Michael (Josie Walker), in order to find out just how Anna is surviving. Or rather, in the words of the bartender at the nearby boarding house, to “prove it’s nonsense, then fuck off home.” Indeed, Elizabeth’s instinctive skepticism chafes against some of the locals, for whom Anna’s story is a symbol of hope. (The drama unfolds in 1862, 10 years after the Great Famine, and the notion of a girl subsisting on faith alone is a fulfilling one).
There are also the stirrings of a sly humor in the basic setup. Elizabeth is essentially taking part in a game, watching out for any sneaky snacks and quizzing Anna with a view to catching her out. (The film doesn’t go into detail about the girl’s bathroom routine, which would surely have solved the mystery pretty quickly.) Meanwhile, Dr. McBrearty (Toby Jones), who’s part of the committee that enlisted Elizabeth, is transfixed by Anna’s condition and postulates theories of his own—“magnetism” perhaps, or “molecules of scent.” In moments like that, you may brace yourself for laughs that brush against the antiquated attitudes of the time, but something in Jones’s performance—in his character’s eagerness to glean that which lies beyond his grasp, and in his willingness to endanger a life for that pursuit—stops the laughs in your throat.
Also in the offing is Will Byrne (Tom Burke), a journalist who’s convinced of foul play. When Elizabeth suspects that Anna’s mother (Elaine Cassidy) may secretly be feeding the girl, and asks that she keep a distance from Anna at all times, the child’s health does start to wilt. It’s then that Byrne describes the parents as being guilty of “murder by degrees.” If this is true, and they are propagating the tale of their child’s miraculous feat, with potentially mortal consequences, are they not guilty of a gruesome parody of their own lie—a kind of malign intervention?
Based on Emma Donoghue’s novel of the same name, The Wonder coheres as a powerful study of the way in which people are cloistered by their own stories. Why else are we led, at the start, through a cavernous studio and have Niamh Algar (who plays Anna’s sister, Kitty) narrate, “This is the beginning of a film called The Wonder,” if not to point up the enveloping power of narrative—the way in which we crave stories as affirmations of experience, and the yearning with which, as moviegoers, we surrender to the realities of others? Hence the movement of the camera, as it pans slowly onto a scaffolded set and peers in, alighting on Pugh’s face as she travels by boat to Ireland. In an instant, we’re sucked in—one truth giving way to another.
Pugh is the centripetal force of The Wonder. Her face, with its steady frowns and fleeting gusts of emotion, betrays not just a constant proximity to pain but reserves of careful determination. We learn that Elizabeth served as a nurse in the Crimean War, and that she lost a baby. The film’s coup is a series of scenes, scattered throughout, which depict a dark release. Elizabeth has a nightly ritual in which she unfurls a blanket, revealing two tiny knitted socks; pricks her finger with a needle, drawing blood; and pours a spoonful of something dark, most likely laudanum, from a glass phial. There, in the soft-grained lighting, she lolls in a rocking rapture, and you realize that the source of her bliss isn’t just the opioid gloop. She has, if only for a brief spell, thrown off her story. She is adrift in the pleasure of plotlessness.
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