Poised somewhere between rhetoric and dream, Canadian filmmaker Sarah Polley's adaptation of Miriam Toews's 2018 novel – in which a group of women meet in secret to plot their response to systemic male violence – might be explicitly designed as allegory, with obvious resonance in the current cultural climate, but it proves to be much more than a simple provocation or #MeToo tract.
CONTENT WARNING: This story discusses sexual assault.
Women Talking, the writer-director's first film in a decade – for which she's earned Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nominations – is a thoughtful, curious work of empathy that taps into something timeless, examining age-old power structures in an attempt to re-imagine the way a society deals with trauma.
Toews's acclaimed work, inspired by the horrific mass rapes that took place in a Bolivian Mennonite colony between 2005 and 2009, responded to atrocity with what she dubbed "an act of female imagination" – words that Polley takes as a guiding principle here.
Her film is deliberately abstract, unfolding in a religious colony cut off from the modern world, in an ostensible recent past that has been rendered out of time – an anyplace America of barns, overalls and horse-drawn-carts.
Framed by the narration of a teenage girl, Outje (Kate Hallett), the film, shot in eerily desaturated greys, has the sense of a nightmare nestled inside a fable.
Polley opens on the image of a woman splayed out on a single bed, her bloodied nightgown a grim testament to the epidemic that has swept the colony: Its men have been drugging women and girls with cow tranquiliser and sexually assaulting them while they're unconscious.
"The elders told us that it was the work of ghosts, or Satan, or that we were lying to get attention, or that it was an act of wild female imagination," Outje recalls in voice over, parsing the patriarchy's protective lies.
Driven to breaking point – what one character calls both "doomsday and a call to prayer" – the women seize a window of time when the men of the colony have left to bail out the rapists, and gather in secret to discuss their course of action.
A decision needs to be made: Will they simply forgive the men, as their religious doctrine dictates; will they hold their ground and fight; or will they leave the colony and set out for another, hopefully better world?
For a while, debate rages. Some of the older women, including the severe, scarred Janz (co-producer Frances McDormand, looking like a vision of Bergman's Death), argue that they must abide by the colony's rules and forgive the men for the sake of their souls.
The younger women are torn.
Mariche, a terminally abused mother played by Jessie Buckley (Men; I'm Thinking of Ending Things), favours forgiveness, while Salome (Claire Foy, The Crown), whose three-year-old daughter has been raped, wants to stay and fight – and, understandably, exact bloody vengeance.
The strangely beatific Ona (Rooney Mara, Nightmare Alley; Carol), meanwhile, remains ambivalent, despite carrying the child of her recent assailant. She's the movie's fulcrum, its conscience.
Because the women are illiterate – the colony permits only its men to read and write – they employ a male schoolteacher, August (Ben Whishaw, No Time To Die), to take the meeting minutes and lend a sympathetic ear. (If you're going to let one male into your inner sanctum, it may as well be the voice of Paddington.)
If you were hoping that a movie titled Women Talking wasn't going to be didactic in some way, you're going to be disappointed – and, it might be argued, missing the point.
Let it not be said that Polley's film doesn't deliver on the promise of its title.
With a narrative necessarily distilled from a more nuanced, complex piece of writing, the film might risk coming across as too rhetorical, its characters mouthpieces for the culture war – a movie in which, say, the depiction of a trauma-affected trans-masc youth (played with delicacy by non-binary actor August Winter) could scan as a cynical bid for topicality in the wrong hands.
Yet Polley (Take This Waltz; Away from Her) is an intelligent, intuitive filmmaker who treats the material with enough sincerity – and crucially, filmmaking curiosity – to keep it from curdling into schematic dot points.
An actor-turned-director, she's also keenly attendant to performance, ensuring her characters talk and act with an essential humanity that deepens the movie's broader ideas. (The film's occasional comic asides, full of unexpected life and laughter, are playful, invigorating counterpoints to the presiding gloom.)
As in her previous film, Stories We Tell (2012), a quasi-documentary that peeled away the myths of her family narrative, Polley has a knack for exploring beyond the literal text; for furnishing her ideas with the possibilities afforded by cinema.
She shoots her chamber drama in expansive wide-screen, suggesting a freedom beyond the confines of her characters' predicament – pushing through Fordian doorframes and into Malick-esque fields, or hovering over the action in God's-eye views that evoke the dissociative nature of the women's survival mechanism.
But it's the small moments of gesture – teenage girls entwining their braids, hands on shoulders or pointed to the sky – that often speak the loudest, capturing the bonds between women, their warmth and secret resilience.
At one point, a hot census taker, all Ray-Bans and stubble, arrives in a pick-up truck like a drifter from a 90s road movie, blasting the Monkees' Daydream Believer over a loudspeaker. It's an incursion of reality that's somehow more unreal than anything in the film, as though the movie is experiencing its own out-of-body moment – run-of-the-mill masculinity as transcendent, hallucinatory fever.
This kind of abstraction softens and refracts the movie's more declamatory moments, creating a space for its bigger questions to breathe.
It's a film with a lot on its mind, and a genuine desire to engage with complexity, especially as it relates to the nature – and nurture – of masculinity.
Like Mara's Ona, Polley isn't without empathy for the film's villains, who she identifies as victims of a broken system. Can such power really be unravelled? Where does the corruption take root? Can boys be saved? What about teenagers?
It's telling that none of the perpetrators are shown as anything more than twisted shadows, while the colony's young boys are given tender, lingering close-ups, their faces seemingly guileless and not yet ravaged by the ills of manhood.
To her credit, Polley doesn't offer up any easy answers, even as she seems to believe that there's hope – or, at the very least, that the future might be unwritten.
Women Talking is in cinemas now.
