105 min | R | February 12, 2021 | Bleecker Street
Two married women on neighboring farms in 1856 fall in love across the fence line and the frozen ground. Abigail keeps a diary, and the diary keeps the secret. The romance is familiar, but the cold and the dread are specific.
Two farm couples scrape out a hard living in upstate New York in 1856. Abigail and Dyer have buried a daughter and barely speak across the grief. When Tallie and Finney take the neighboring land, Abigail and Tallie find in each other the one thing their marriages cannot supply. Mona Fastvold builds the film around the diary Abigail keeps, so the romance arrives in present tense and in retrospect at the same time. The real subject is not the forbidden love. It is the cost of wanting anything at all when you belong to a husband and a season and a ledger.
Katherine Waterston plays Abigail as a woman who has trained herself out of expectation. She speaks her diary in flat, careful sentences, and Waterston lets the want leak through the discipline. Vanessa Kirby plays Tallie with a quicker, more dangerous appetite, a woman who tests the edges of her cage to see if it gives. Casey Affleck plays Dyer as decent and frightened, a husband who senses the loss but cannot name it. Christopher Abbott plays Finney with a controlled menace that turns the second half taut. The two marriages mirror each other, and the four performances make the symmetry feel earned rather than schematic.
Fastvold directs from a script by Jim Shepard and Ron Hansen, adapted from Shepard’s short story. The film organizes itself by the almanac, marking the passage of months and weather so the affair runs on the same clock as the crops and the cold. Fastvold shoots the interiors close and dim, with faces caught in the small light of a single window or candle, so the farmhouse feels like a held breath. The diary narration does the heavy lifting, and it teeters on the literary throughout. When the images and the voice pull apart, the film leans too hard on the words.
This is a chamber piece about confinement, and it commits to the smallness of its world. Fastvold trusts silence and labor and the long winter to carry the dread. The familiar shape of the period romance is here, and the film does not pretend to reinvent it. What it offers instead is the texture of a particular grief and a particular want, rendered by actors who refuse to oversell either.