The World to Come

The two women at the center of Mona Fastvold's beautiful and tragic story, The World to Come, are farm wives in Upstate New York in 1856. They are trapped in miserable marriages, beset by drudgery and isolation, but find in each other, first, kindred spirits then soul mates and then lovers.

Told through hauntingly poetic journal entries by Abigail (Katherine Waterston), the film unfolds languidly. Abigail's attraction to the amorous Tallie (a smoky and spectacular Vanessa Kirby) begins as an ember but eventually consumes her and pushes her to the brink of insanity.

Abigail, who is still mourning the loss of her young daughter to diphtheria, is unequally yoked to the honorable but forlorn Dyer (Casey Affleck), whose name is a homophone descriptive of the couple's precarious existence. Tallie is married to Finney (Christopher Albert), a scornful martinet, who resents the world, his wife and her resistance to bearing him children.

The exchanges between the women are seductive and warm, those with their husbands, coarse and cold. The women's exchanges with one another are entrancing. Their exchanges with their husbands, terse and epigrammatic, more proverbial than heartfelt.

Fastvold's direction is elegant, her attention to period detail extraordinary, and her love for these four unfortunate characters is in every frame of the picture.