104 min | PG-13 | December 23, 2022 | United Artists Releasing
The women of an isolated religious colony learn the truth about who has been attacking them in the night. They have two days and three choices: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. The whole movie is the argument, and the argument is the point.
The women of a remote Mennonite colony learn that the men have been drugging and assaulting them for years. The men leave for two days to post bail for the attackers. The women gather in a hayloft and vote among three options: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave the only world they know. The film makes the argument itself the action. It asks whether faith requires you to forgive the people who destroy you.
Rooney Mara plays Ona as the calm center, pregnant and unmarried, thinking in abstractions while the others rage. Claire Foy plays Salome with a fury that wants to kill, the woman who would burn the colony down. Jessie Buckley plays Mariche as the one who defends staying because leaving means admitting how much she has already survived. Ben Whishaw plays August, the schoolteacher who takes the minutes because the women cannot read or write. Judith Ivey and Sheila McCarthy play the elders who hold the room together when the younger women fracture. Frances McDormand appears briefly as Scarface Janz, the woman who chooses to stay and do nothing.
Sarah Polley directs and adapts the novel by Miriam Toews. She drains the color almost entirely from the frame. Luc Montpellier shoots in a gray, desaturated palette that looks like a faded photograph, the present tense already turned into memory. The camera stays inside the hayloft and trusts the faces to carry the tension. Hildur Gudnadottir’s score enters sparingly and never pushes the emotion the dialogue has already earned. Polley cuts away to the children and the fields just often enough to remind you what the vote will cost.
This is a film of talk, and the talk is the point. Polley films a community deciding whether forgiveness under coercion is forgiveness at all. The argument never resolves into a slogan because the women do not agree and the film respects that. The weakness is that the allegory sometimes speaks louder than the people, and the characters tip into positions rather than living as women. The strength is that Polley takes a room of voices and makes deliberation feel like the most radical act these women have ever taken. The vote is small, but the decision to hold it at all is enormous.