REVIEW: Women Talking tells powerful story about reclaiming agency, fighting for future
Sarah Polley's newest film deserves to be in Oscar conversation
Do nothing. Stay and fight. Leave.
These are the three choices at the heart of the decision the characters are faced with at the start of Women Talking, the newest film from director and co-writer Sarah Polley that is an adaptation of Miriam Toew’s 2018 novel. Set in a not-so-distant past, a group of women in an isolated religious colony struggle to reconcile their faith with a string of sexual assaults committed by the colony’s men.
“This story begins before you were born,” the film’s young narrator Autje says to set the scene for what we’re about to see. The narration coming from one of the film’s female characters is one of the biggest changes Polley’s script made from the original novel, but it’s one that works well to form the framing device as a story being passed down from the women of the colony from generation to generation. Autje talks about how things got to this point — the way the assaults were ignored by the men of the colony, who insisted on putting the responsibility for the attacks on ghosts, Satan or the imaginations of the women.
As the men of the colony head into the city to post bail for the attackers, they tell the women to be ready to apologize or be faced with expulsion from the colony and to be denied entry into the Kingdom of Heaven. “We had 24 hours to imagine what kind of world you were born into,” Autje tells the child her narration is aimed at as we see the women voting on what they should do next.
What follows over the course of the next 90 minutes after the introduction to the film is an incredible self-contained story that is mostly set in one location but is made to feel epic due to the powerful conversations being had and the amazing performances from the full ensemble performing it. You get a feel right away for who these characters are and how they’re working through the process of understanding what they’ve been through and what the next steps they should take are. There’s a moment in this conversation where it seems to click for them. It becomes less about what should they do, and more about them knowing what they need to but working up the courage to go with their gut and do it.
There’s a version of Women Talking that could be exactly what a lot of critics who have been negative about it are implying that it is. It could be a brutal watch, full of the characters all being miserable and viscerally recalling their assaults as we have to watch them go through it. But the choices Polley makes in the direction and the screenplay takes what could be a very hard film to watch and performs a sort of magic trick that turns it into a story of hope, taking back your agency, and moving forward into a better future.
It takes an amazing cast to be able to pull off a delicate balancing act like this film requires, and Women Talking features arguably the best ensemble of the year. Jessie Buckley and Claire Foy are the standouts, they get a lot of the bigger emotional moments as they are really actively working through the anger they’re feeling and weighing a lot of things as they make their final decisions. Judith Ivey is great serving as the maternal figure, not only literally to Buckley’s character but also figuratively to the group as a whole. The other supporting performance that has garnered a lot of buzz is Ben Whishaw as August, the only man who is with the women in the barn as the colony’s teacher who is brought in to take the minutes so that the story of what happened can eventually be passed on. He brings sincerity and sensitivity to the role that works extremely well.
But the piece that is maybe the most integral is what Rooney Mara does. Her performance is more understated, but she brings that optimism for the future and the understanding that they are able to make the hard choices they’re going to make in order for the future generations of women from this colony to have better lives and not have to deal with the problems they did.
The super desaturated look of the film has been polarizing, and it caught me off guard early on and I didn’t think I liked it. But the more I watched, and then on a rewatch, it makes sense. At the end of the day, these characters have been stuck in a nightmare on this colony for a long time, and nightmares don’t look the way real life does. The life has been sucked out of them the longer they’ve been trapped there, and the colors of the movie mirror that while the women are talking through what they need to do in order to have brighter days ahead.
It’s a film that will stick with you, makes you think about the things people have been through and what it takes sometimes in order to have the bravery to take the steps necessary to see a better tomorrow. It’s a deeply compassionate, multi-generational tale that works on so many levels and is a must-watch.
Women Talking is currently in select theaters, and will be releasing nationwide January 20.