MOVIE REVIEW: Sarah Polley finds stunning drama in one simple night of conversations in a barn.
world in which a woman’s ability to choose her destiny is significantly circumscribed. The film is based on Miriam Toews’ acclaimed 2018 novel, which found its inspiration in a shocking true story about the systemic drugging and raping of women from 2005 until 2009 in an ultraconservative Mennonite community in Bolivia: not by criminal interlopers, but by men within the sect.
In screenwriter/director Sarah Polley’s compact adaptation of Toews’ book, the setting is somewhat vague. The women’s modest attire of homemade dresses and head coverings, as well as the horse-drawn buggies roaming a remote agrarian landscape, initially suggest an Anabaptist Christian society somewhere in the 19th-century heartland.
While this may not sound terribly cinematic, Polley keeps things moving at a good pace as the looming deadline creates tension. She periodically interrupts the deliberation with reminders of why this weighty duty must be undertaken, with shots of children innocently playing outside the barn interspersed with sobering flashbacks of dazed women waking up in their beds, mystifyingly covered in blood and bruises.
The quintet of actresses performing the principal roles are strong. Foy and Buckley necessarily dominate because their characters are the loudest, each fueled by a rage borne either from a vindictive need for revenge or hopeless self-loathing. For a while, each of their characters seems trapped in a loop from which she can’t break free, unlike the beatific Mara. But the group’s seasoned elders, played by Ivey and McCarthy, are the characters that stay with you.
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