Women Talking

 

Writer / director Sarah Polley's Women Talking is a horror story of the most searing variety because the monsters are within us. 

The movie features powerful performances by eight actresses and one actor in a story set in a Mennonite community where men and boys have routinely raped and assaulted the women with impunity.

When one of the men is identified and he implicates others, the men leave to tend to bail, and the women in the colony hold a plebiscite to decide if they should stay and forgive the men and thus safeguard their eternal reward, stay and fight the men, or leave. 

A dozen women are chosen to represent the others in the colony in the deliberations. Marische (an explosive Jessie Buckley) is determined to stay despite the sadistic treatment by her husband, Ona (a beatific Rooney Mara) is pregnant from her attacker, a young mother Salome (Claire Foy) who has discovered violent hatred in the wake of serial abuse, two wise grandmothers Greta (Sheila McCarthy) and Agata (Judith Ivey), and a spirited young woman suffering from trauma-induced seizures, Mejal (Michelle McLeod) are among those gathered in the colony's barn to talk through, for the first time, the hell that has been their lives.

It's a riveting conversation that is transcribed by a once-excommunicated young man, August (Ben Whishaw), who has returned to the colony to teach the boys and perhaps marry Ona. Girls are prohibited from going to school, so none of the women can read or write.  Polley intersperses in the women's conversation scenes of children playing in sun-dappled fields -- none of the other men in the colony makes an on-camera appearance, even though their presence is always tangible. 

Uncertainty hangs thick in the air during this remarkable film, as the day wears on and night descends. It is agonizing viewing because the women's resolution to not be enslaved by fear or faith is not presented as sure relief from their torture. That seems to be out of their hands. The best they can do is, well, to do the best they can -- and, perhaps, pray.