The Canadian writer-director Sarah Polley’s superbly inventive adaptation of Miriam Toews’s 2018 novel begins with a declaration: “What follows is an act of female imagination.” That phrase, taken directly from Toews, is pointedly double-edged, having been used by the elders of a remote religious colony to explain away years of drugged sexual assaults – attacks attributed to ghosts, demons, or hysteria (“wild female imagination”) that have left women and girls terrorised, pregnant or dead. When the assailants are finally caught and taken into custody “for their own protection”, the women have a brief window in which to imagine their future. Should they stay within the community that has raped and abused them, or leave, thereby casting themselves out of the Garden of Eden, estranged from the God in whom they still place their faith?
The ensuing Socratic debate resembles a cross between Arthur Miller’s 1953 stage play The Crucible and Dutch film-maker Marleen Gorris’s electrifying 1982 feminist psychodrama A Question of Silence, played out within the makeshift courtroom of a hayloft. “How will we be forgiven, if not by the elders whom we have disobeyed?” demands Mariche (Jessie Buckley), facing the prospect that “we will be forced to leave the colony if we don’t forgive the men”. “Is forgiveness that is forced upon us true forgiveness?” counters the strangely serene Ona (Rooney Mara), to which Judith Ivey’s Agata adds: “Perhaps forgiveness can, in some instances, be confused with permission.”
As for Salome (Claire Foy), she’d rather “stand my ground and shoot each man in the heart”, vowing to “burn forever in hell before I allow another man to satisfy his violent urges with the body of my four-year-old child”. Most disturbing, however, are the words of Mejal (Michelle McLeod), who has panic attacks because “they made us disbelieve ourselves” – leaving a gaping silence crying out to be filled by voices sardonically described in the novel as “only women talking”.
While Toews’s story was told from the perspective of August, a young male teacher (played here by a pathos-laden Ben Whishaw) who had been enlisted to take the minutes of the meeting, Polley astutely hands her narration to Autje (Kate Hallett), Mariche’s teenage daughter, who addresses herself to Ona’s unborn child. “We had 24 hours to imagine what kind of world you would be born into,” says Autje, as cinematographer Luc Montpellier’s widescreen frame slips between the open vistas of the colony’s fields and the cloistered, quasi-gothic interiors of the hayloft. At times I was reminded of the early black-and-white barnyard scenes from The Wizard of Oz (Polley makes pointed use of colour desaturation), with the promise of unexpected new vistas awaiting beyond wooden doors.
In her brilliantly slippery 2012 masterpiece, Stories We Tell, Polley unpacked the interface between reality and artifice within a deceptive docudrama format. Here she adapts a novel inspired by a shocking, stranger-than-fiction true story (the horrors uncovered in a Mennonite community in Bolivia in 2009 beggar belief) that Toews calls “an imagined response to real events”. The subject matter may be sombre, yet the tone of these conversations is thrillingly vibrant and engaging, with a strong streak of acerbic humour binding the characters together, such as the two young girls who interweave their braided hair in an act of playful defiance.
An atmosphere of empathy, reason and wit pervades Polley’s film, underwritten by an emancipatory urgency (“that day we learned to vote”) that drives the narrative even in its darkest moments. Flashbacks may illuminate these discussions, but Polley keeps the atrocities off-screen, relying instead on wonderfully nuanced ensemble performances to grip the audience’s attention. Yes, individual images linger in the mind: an alarming overhead shot that implies both a God’s-eye view and an out-of-body experience; a closeup of Frances McDormand’s character Scarface Janz resembling Ingmar Bergman’s iconic embodiment of Death. But it’s the sinewy drama of the central philosophical argument that rings truest, calling to mind the passionate political debate set piece that lies at the heart of Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom.
Hildur Guðnadóttir’s sparingly used score lends a yearning, melancholic strength to the proceedings, perfectly melding ancient and modern elements, quietly enhancing a tale that is at once timely and timeless.
