The Wonder, a Florence Pugh-studded period drama with perfectly boring cinematography, is precisely the type of film Netflix needs more of: a truly memorable low-budget film with true artistic merit that’s performance- rather than star-driven. It’s a film that fully leans into what makes it work. They need more The Wonders and fewer Red Notices.
Set in the Irish Midlands in 1862, the latest film by Chilean director Sebastián Lelio (Disobedience, Gloria Bell) stars Pugh (in what will likely be her best performance of the year unless Puss and Boots: The Last Wish pulls an upset) as the London-based nurse Elizabeth (Lib) Wright, who is sent to observe a young girl, Anna O’Donnell (Kíla Lord Cassidy), who has not eaten anything but “God’s manna” for an entire four months. At least, that’s the story.
Speaking of stories, I was blindsided by the film’s meta opening—in which Elaine Cassidy (who plays Anna’s mother, Rosaleen O’Donnell) speaks about stories and the power of believing in them from outside the film’s opening set. “We are nothing without stories,” she says from her meta-location peering into the film’s set, “So we invite you to believe in this one.”
Those familiar with the work of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell might appreciate this framing, but I thought more of the philosophy of another scholar of religion: the 19th-century German Lutheran Rudolf Bultmann, who famously attempted to demythologize the Christian scriptures. Like Bultmann, Lib and a few other skeptical town members see historical and material forces motivating the mythic and doubt the hagiographic story. They, with reason, suspect someone is surreptitiously shoveling her food.
In the meta-beginning, Cassidy teases the buy-in of her peers and the extent to which their characters are able to find inspiration in stories. She’s right. Pugh and the younger Lord Cassidy both fully commit to their characters—and I have no room to doubt their own beliefs in the film’s resolution. Pugh, especially, sells the story through her subtle performance, which requires less big emotion than her typical roles. Anything less would have spoiled the show.
But, also like Bultmann, Lelio and his team respect and even believe in the power of myths, or stories. “Myth does not want to be interpreted in cosmological terms but in anthropological terms—or, better, in existentialist terms,” according to Bultmann. And that’s exactly Lelio’s approach to the conclusion of The Wonder.
I’ll speak vaguely to avoid spoilers, but as Anna’s condition worsens and Lib becomes convinced her parents’ piety is putting their daughter in danger, Lib sees an opportunity to tell a story—a story about a resurrection that has the ability to heal two grieving souls. It’s the same story Bultmann told about a first-century Palestinian man: the way of history tells us literal bodily resurrections are impossible; nevertheless, people have found beauty and truth, and healing in the story; the story itself is where the true power of the resurrection rests.
The Wonder
2022
dir. Sebastián Lelio
109 min.
Streaming Wednesday, 11/16 on Netflix