“The Wonder” feels like an important step in the maturity of Florence Pugh onscreen. It is not Pugh’s first lead role. It is not even her first lead role for 2022 after the mixed results of Olivia Wilde’s dystopian “Don’t Worry Darling”. But it’s easy to draw a relational line from Pugh’s breakout performance in “Lady Macbeth” and her more mature, layered, and nuanced work in Sebastian Lelio’s latest film. In “The Wonder”, Lelio solders the atmosphere of tension and unease in 1862 Ireland to every fibre of Pugh’s performance – the furrowed brow of her frown, the contemplative way she stalks through the landscape and the intrepid cadence in her voice when she finds herself countering traditions in a culture she does not know or understand. The film opens with a disembodied voice speaking as the camera travels through a modern soundstage, introducing a peculiar framing device that first sees that seems incongruous with the film’s period sensibilities. The voice muses on the essential nature of storytelling as the soundstage seems to transfer before our eyes into the lower deck of a boat where Pugh’s Nurse Lib Wright is eating. “It is with her we begin,” the voice tells us. And it is with her that the film stays.
Before we can discern the exact sensibilities behind “The Wonder”, Ari Wegner’s cinematography and Matthew Herbert’s music become the key accomplices in stoking the mood of unease and tension that Lelio will come to depend upon. Wegner’s camera seems to be constantly in motion, not with something frantic and excitable but with a slow and chilling steadiness that leaves us seeking out clues on the periphery of every frame. Herbert’s music, its percussive insistence often seeming to take cues from rustic sounds, only heightens the notion of dread and unease. Something is not right here.
The story is spare. Nurse Wright has been summoned to the Irish Midlands for reasons she seems unclear about. The unease deepens when she learns that a nun has also been summoned to attend to the same case. When she meets her summoners, she is informed of the peculiar task. Anna O’Donnell is an eleven-year-old girl, who appears to be in good health, has not eaten anything in the four months since her last birthday. The nurse and the nun will keep watch over her in eight hour shifts to solve the mystery of this. Is it a holy act of the divine, a new scientific frontier where nutrients can be gained sans food, or is something more complicated at play? Their task has the shape of a mystery, and yet “The Wonder” – despite having that mystery as one of the defining aspects of its spine – feels less concerned with holding steadfast to notions of mystery in its structure and instead binds itself to the Nurse Wright, who finds herself emotionally grappling with the dynamics of the girl’s plight.
“The Wonder” is generically removed from Chilean Lelio’s previous work. It is a decisive foray into an atmospheric drama, with elements of a thriller, that feels like a vital extension of his gifts. His work here speaks to the current slate of young Latin American filmmakers (particularly including Lelio’s countryman, and sometimes collaborator Pablo Larraín) whose work has been marked by constant experiments in genres and form that emphasise their willingness to be risky and unexpected in their approach to their work. This structural riskiness, however, is married to a singularity of ideology that binds their work even when the surface level generic risks feel unusual. Even as “The Wonder” feels like a foray into something new for Lelio, it feels bound to his recent work in other ways.
Over the course of his last five films, Lelio’s work has been rooted in the ways that women come to exist in isolating environments. “The Wonder” is his third English-language film, after “Gloria Bell” (with Julianne Moore, a remake of Lelio’s own Spanish-language “Gloria) and “Disobedience” (with Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams). His two other films, “Gloria” and “A Fantastic Woman” each retain a sharpened focus on the woman at their centre. Lelio’s calling card as a director has been a preternatural ability to understand the sensibilities of his performers, and in “The Wonder” that tension of a woman isolated is met with the precise fervour of Pugh’s tenacity.
Lelio, wisely, does more than present the tale of this woman in a strange land as one that neatly bifurcates into camps of good and bad or right and wrong. Pugh appears in almost every scene, so we hew close to her perspective. But Nurse Wright is tending to skeletons in her own closet. A night-time ritual involving bloodplay, which is never completely explained, offers just the note of ambiguous casualness that deepens the film’s central thesis, which asks us to contemplate the various stories that persons hold on to in order to survive. “The Wonder” is preoccupied with the rationalisations and risks of belief we must make for our survival physically, but also mentally. The Great Famine casts a long shadow over the film’s sense of time and place, deepened by the appearance of Tom Burke’s William Byrne – a journalist sent to investigate Anna’s case. Even when “The Wonder” gains cachet from the cultural contrast of this English nurse in this Irish countryside, Lelio (who cowrites the script with Alice Birch and Emma Donoghue whose novel the film is based on) is not explicitly concerned with questions of historicity or extending its historical inspiration to dictate historical context to us. Instead, the story’s spareness traps us into the limited perspective of this specific woman in this specific village at this specific time hoping for some absolution.
It’s a choice that leaves the film deliberately steeped in an opacity for its first two acts that is essential to its ambiguity and tensions. At first, we are not sure what is at work. And even as we slowly learn the real stakes at hand, “The Wonder” seeks not to provide answers as resolutions as they only leave new questions in their wake. This leaves much of the film steeped in moments where characters say very little, or accidentally find themselves vulnerable to prevarication. In an early moment, Nurse Wright misunderstands a euphemism for death. It’s a small moment that feels key to the ways that characters deliberately choose words not just for their meaning for the possibility of words conjuring up versions of the truth that allow for some wisp of hope in the stark reality of their everyday drudgery. The lurching ambivalence of “The Wonder”, with its deeply felt silences, its restless score and a gloomy mise-en-scène that feels more like a horror movie at times than a contemplative period drama, wants its audience to sit with the tension of not knowing for as much as it can.
Even the seemingly transparent morality of Nurse Wright is not innocent of the equivocation that runs through “The Wonder”. That Lelio and his team resist any notion of having Pugh narrate Wright’s thoughts, and instead leaves the responsibility of mapping the complex moral questions Lib Wright must confront on Pugh feels like an important show of trust. And it is a trust that Pugh honours with great capacity for nuance. A late-film confrontation with the bevy of men who have summoned her, finds Nurse Wright forced to repeat herself as they overrule her. On each line-reading Pugh must shift the stress of her words, each quell of her voice communicating a different facet of her fear but also her ferocity. It’s such gradations – her eyes silently gazing out at the terrain, a sigh before stolidly preparing for a confrontation, the glint of desire in her eye before an embrace – that distinguish the complexity of Pugh’s characterisation.
Lelio may be slightly heavy-handed in conveying “The Wonder” as a story built on storytelling and sometimes the framing device that acts as conduit feels effortful in its overtness. However, it is a gambit that feels central to the film’s murkiness – both aesthetically, and emotionally. Even when “The Wonder” is completely muted of the mystery in its final act it still feels swathed with tension and ellipses. So that the film’s “resolution” feels much richer because of that tension and uncertainty more than one which easily says some are wrong and some are right. The peculiar gifts of “The Wonder” are likely to be unexpected for audiences. Every sinew of this tale seems to swerve from our expectations. But its swerves reward the patience, and needle at the possibilities of what we are willing to imagine. Lelio has gifted Pugh with a role that is likely to prove as definitive in her career. Even as the film earns its title from the would-be wonder of the miracle child, it offers us its own wonder of Florence Pugh’s interminable gifts as a performer.
The Wonder premieres on Netflix on November 16
