‘The Wonder’ Examines Questions of Hunger and Trauma

If the lilting Irish drear of the recent release The Banshees of Inisherin just wasn’t gloomy enough for you, perhaps Sebastián Lelio’s new film The Wonder (in theaters November 2, on Netflix November 16) will satisfy that appetite. Grave and mysterious, The Wonder is a drama about a terrible time in Ireland’s history, and the perhaps eternal clench of religion and superstition. 

It’s 1862 in a small Irish village, the ragged population still staggering around in the ruinous aftermath of the Great Famine, which killed a million people and saw the emigration of twice that number. Those left behind are battered and haunted, and perhaps primed to believe in something miraculous. And thus a young girl, Anna (Kila Lord Cassidy), has convinced her fellow townsfolk that she is surviving on “manna from heaven” alone; she hasn’t eaten any food in four months, she says, a kind of divine corrective to the hunger that has so ravaged Ireland, particularly its children.

Florence Pugh plays Lib, a nurse from London who has been brought across the Irish Sea to investigate Anna’s claims. Laden with both personal grief and harrowing memories of her time as a nurse during the Crimean War, Lib is a familiar kind of detective: flinty with a sad backstory, a Scully-esque skeptic who loses a bit of herself as a cloistered community envelops her. 

The Wonder is adapted from the novel by Emma Donoghue, whose bestselling Room was another intimate portrait of a child (and his mother) in peril. Lelio’s film is a more gothic take on that subject and is perhaps more concerned with community ethos than with the ailing child at the center of this collective delusion—or, maybe, sinister hoax. 

In some senses, The Wonder is a procedural, as Lib prods at possible explanations and her overseers—Toby Jones’s petty and unscientific physician, Ciarán Hinds’s looming clergyman—thwart her attempts at rational diagnosis. But Lelio’s creeping visuals (with Ari Wegner’s invaluable cinematography) and Matthew Herbert’s eerie-ethereal score suggest something more metaphysical than practical. There is a mystery to be solved, sure, but the ineffable whims and obsessions of heart and mind can perhaps never be answered. 

The Wonder has a moody, immersive pull. Its grim atmosphere conjures up both the horror of the past and a chilly sense of foreboding, connecting this fictional depiction of mass trauma to, perhaps, our own. We, too, are gripped by a sense of the world ending, or having already ended. We’ve seen that fear and despair give birth to so many fugues of dangerous magical conviction, burbling up online and, more and more, carried into the halls of power. 

At least, that’s one way to read the film. Complicating interpretation is Lelio’s choice to employ a gimmicky framing device to drive home some kind of point. The Wonder begins with an acknowledgment of its artifice, showing us a soundstage as a narrator, the actor Niamh Algar, explains what we are about to watch. The film ends with her too, a reminder that what we’ve seen is but a story, one of the many that make up human civilization. Science, so fiercely clung to by Lib, is a story same as religion is, a character played by Algar posits in the film. All of our perception is just narrative, a somewhat dubious assertion that Lelio nonetheless wants to drive home.

This is a strained synthesizing of themes, an unnecessary bit of meta wankery that badly breaks the film’s engulfing spell. It plays like avant-garde pretension, a throwback to the self-conscious presentation of 20th-century theater—and, certainly, some film. The Wonder is otherwise too deliberately cramped and interior a film to support this wild swing toward Brechtian alienation. 

Lelio’s haughty piece of flair doesn’t diminish the impression made by Pugh, who fluidly projects compassion tinged with the faintest hint of menace. Stern and resourceful, Pugh’s Lib has confronted the most visceral evidence of our fragile mortality. She brooks no fantastical thinking, even the sort that might be called hope. Pugh expertly complicates that pragmatism with Lib’s own weathered frailty; Lib can’t stop her own pain from informing Anna’s, which sets them both on a risky course. Compare this Pugh to the one seen in Midsommar, another unblinking picture of terror and mourning, and it’s clear just how wide-ranging Pugh’s understanding of human behavior truly is. That magnetic intelligence brings The Wonder close to transcendence, until its director throws back the curtain and, quite fruitlessly, reminds us it’s all been for show.