Netflix The Wonder (2022)

[Adam Lenhardt]

Title: The Wonder (2022)

Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Drama

Director: Sebastián Lelio

Cast: Florence Pugh, Kíla Lord Cassidy, Tom Burke, Niamh Algar, Elaine Cassidy, Ruth Bradley, Toby Jones, Ciarán Hinds, Dermot Crowley, Caolan Byrne, Brían F. O'Byrne, Josie Walker, David Wilmot, Stephen Ball, Mary Murray, Niamh Finlay, John Burke, Emer Casey, Graeme Coughlan, Abigail Coburn, Ava May Taylor, Janet Grene, David Maine

Release: 2022-11-02

Runtime: 109

Plot: Haunted by her past, a nurse travels from England to a remote Irish village in 1862 to investigate a young girl's supposedly miraculous fast.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

One of Netflix's Oscar contenders this year, it's a period piece and literary adaptation that defies expectations from its opening shot: As it pans across a brightly lit soundstage, the skeletal backsides of sets pass in front of the lens. The narrator, who we will not meet for some time, sets the stage:

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"Hello. This is the beginning. The beginning a film called The Wonder. The people you are about to meet, the characters, believe in their stories with complete devotion. We are nothing without stories, and so we invite you to believe in this one."​

The camera arrives at its destination, dollies closer, and suddenly it is 1862 and we are onboard a ship traveling across the Irish Sea from England to Ireland, following young nurse hired by a rural village for a most unorthodox assignment.

The foregrounding of the artifice of filmmaking is not an artistic indulgence; this is a movie about storytelling, about the power of stories to hurt and to heal. The nurse, played by Florence Pugh, tells her own stories to make sense of what her life has wrought. And everyone in the village has a story to tell. What is true is less important than what is believed, and what is acted upon. The events of this movie only make sense in the context of this time and this place: the fraught history between Ireland and the British Empire; the Great Famine that had devastated Ireland less than two decades earlier; the pervasive moral framework and institutional power of the Catholic Church; and the secrets and tragedies of one family in the face of all of that.

Held in the balance is the life of one young girl, who may be a miracle or may be a sacrificial lamb.

Pugh has a talent for period characters, and this is no exception. She has a worthy partner in newcomer Kíla Lord Cassidy, who must be enigmatic, slightly ethereal, and yet also innocently childlike.

 

[Joe Wong]

Saw this Friday. Atmospheric & moody, intriguing at first, though resolution is a little too easy.