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66th BFI London Film Festival: The Wonder

Photo: Courtesy Netflix.

Bringing just slightly less drama to the festival than her last film did to Cannes, Florence Pugh headlined this Friday’s Gala presentation The Wonder, a film which has as exceptional a pedigree as any other. Directed by Sebastian Lelio who won an Oscar for A Fantastic Woman and also directed Disobedience, which I personally loved. It was shot by Ari Wegener whose cinematography for The Power of the Dog last year was second to none. It’s based on a novel by Emma Donoghue whose book Room was adapted into one of my favorite films of 2015 and the script for this film was penned with Donoghue and Lelio by Alice Birch who scripted Lady Macbeth, one of the first opportunities Florence Pugh had to show us what an exceptional talent she was. With all that plus a cast including not just Pugh but stellar character actors like Tom Burke, Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds and Niamh Algar, what storm could possibly blow this ship off course?

Errr…well, let’s just start at the beginning.

Set in 1862, Pugh stars as Elizabeth Wright, a nurse fresh from the Crimea and a more personal trauma, dispatched to a freshly post-famine Ireland to “watch” over a young farm girl who has, miraculously it seems, gone over four months without sustenance without failing or growing ill. Those present are quick to claim a miracle, or else some wondrous new scientific phenomenon. Wright is there, as well as a nun, to provide witness to the events surrounding young Anna (Kila Lord Cassidy).

Sadly, what follows is a relatively crass and labored science-vs-religion melodrama that isn’t half as clever as it seems to think it is. I’ve not read the book but one rather suspects it’s rather more of an ‘airport read’, shall we say? Certainly not the flinty drama Lelio mounts it as, with a fourth-wall-breaking approach that’s tiresome at best, insufferably self-satisfied at worst. Yes, it’s there to mirror the main theme about the stories we tell ourselves and it’s all about stories, but when the film begins and ends with a pull back to reveal the film studio it’s all actually taking place on, you damn well better have said something hard-hitting or nuanced enough to bear thinking about. Something to take back with you into reality. It’s one of the most contrived and unearned examples of Brechtian alienation I can recall, and Brechtian alienation is almost always contrived and unearned, even at the best of times.

The story being told is just so blunt, with characters talking to each other exclusively in screamingly obvious literary devices. When the visiting journalist hands the young saint a thaumatrope (one of those wooden spinning discs with the bird on one side and the cage on the other) and she asks “but is the bird in the cage or not?” it was all I could do not to shout “OH, COME ON!” at the screen. There’s bits and pieces about trauma, grief, rape, child abuse, colonialism, addiction, sexism, piety, zealotry, but it’s all handled with the same blunt declarative metaphors and no real sense of creativity or purpose. If I were at all religious, I might well be offended by this film, were it not for the fact that everyone seems in for the same condescending treatment, above all the audience.

The thing is, it nearly works. If The Wonder seemed more self-aware of what a melodramatic farce it is then it could’ve found the right tone for itself, but Lelio plays it so straight and seriously. The score by Matthew Herbert, which is on paper the best thing about the film, is so intense and doomy, it seems intent on forcing this material into becoming something serious and profound when it really isn’t. I’m not sure whether a tone that was looser and more flexible, or even just less dour and self-important could’ve salvaged The Wonder and turned it into the truly impressive work of cinema it clearly believes it is.

I’m not convinced that the material has much going for it even on paper. The premise is okay but every aspect of the execution is so labored. It’s crying out to be analyzed and discussed around the table at your next dinner party, but it’s so resolutely middlebrow. There isn’t any single part of The Wonder that I can point to and say it’s bad. The cinematography is phenomenal, the cast have all been better elsewhere but they acquit themselves fine. As stated, the score really did not need to go so hard, and the sets and costumes are all fit for purpose. It’s just that the overall picture is…I’d call it confused? The story jumbles together a lot of themes and ideas in a way you can get away with in a novel but not really in a 100-minute film where you can’t go that deep into them all, resulting in a very shallow and generic take on each of them and when the film does start wading into deeper waters it just comes off exploitative and tasteless.

Honestly, The Wonder does kind of remind me of Don’t Worry Darling. Can’t take it away from any of the three screenwriters, they can cover their tracks better than Silberman and co. could but you are left with a similar feeling that a threadbare story is being oversold. For all its faults, Don’t Worry Darling understood that if you’re going to be crass, the least you can do is to not be dreary at the same time.

Written by Hal Kitchen

A graduate of the University of Kent, Reviews Editor Hal Kitchen joined Film Obsessive as a freelance writer in May 2020 following their postgraduate studies in Film with a specialization in Gender Theory and Studies. In November 2020 Hal assumed their role as Reviews Editor. Since then, Hal has written extensively for the site, writing analytical and critical pieces on film, and has represented the site at international film festivals including The London Film Festival and Panic Fest.

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