The Wonder

 The Wonder (Sebastian Lelio, Netflix 2022) is not exactly a barrel of fun.  In fact, the film is so cheerless and dire that it's hard for me to recommend:  if the idea of watching an eleven-year old girl starve to death for ninety minutes appeals to you, then, this is your movie.  That said, The Wonder is intelligently made, well-scripted, and fascinating in a gruesome way.  My reservations about the picture have nothing to do with the craft with which the film was produced, the acting in the movie, or, even, its general themes -- my reservations relate to the fact that the movie is an ordeal to watch; some things are better read about than seen and, I think, The Wonder falls into this category.

In some remote and primitive backwater in Ireland, a young girl (Anna) has achieved notoriety, even a whiff of sanctity, by not touching a bite of food for four months.  (Her last repast was the body and blood of Christ taken at Communion).  The story takes place in the Victorian era, immediately after the Crimean War and the Irish potato famine -- both events cast a long shadow on the narrative.  A nurse from London travels to the bogs where the the girl lives with her parents; she is commissioned to watch the girl to confirm that her anorexia isn't fraudulent.  Since Anna is deemed to be a candidate for canonization, a nun is also charged with watching the girl when the nurse, the protagonist in the film, is off-duty.  The nurse is a "modern" woman, liberated according to the mores of the time.  (In fact, she's called "Lib" by the little girl.)  Of course, she clashes with the power structure in the village, a commission of five old men who have appropriated the miracle for their own purposes.  The nurse, named Elizabeth Davis, is badly damaged by her experiences in the Crimean War and has lost a baby, the product of a brief mesalliance -- the father decamped a couple days after the three week old infant died.  Elizabeth seems to be addicted to laudanum (or something that looks like cough syrup) and she morosely swallows her drug while ritualistically handling the little booties that her dead baby once wore.  In the course of the film, Elizabeth has a sexual encounter with an Irish journalist who plays a consequential role in the plot.  (As a measure of the film's depressive tone, the journalist's back-story is that his family of origin perished in the potato famine after having nailed shut from the inside the doors to their hovel -- they didn't want to endure the indignity of wandering around starving and, then, dropping dead in the street.)   Elizabeth solves the mystery of how the girl has survived for four months -- the answer to this enigma is suitably grotesque and will be nauseating to some sensibilities.  However, solving the mystery of the source of the girl's nourishment -- Anna calls it manna -- has the perverse effect of shutting down this supply of food.  Accordingly, the girl, who has been fed by her mother in the context of rather gothic family circumstances, now begins to starve in earnest.  She becomes weaker and weaker, loses the ability to walk, and, after being pushed around in wheel chair for part of the movie, becomes bedridden.  Elizabeth presents her findings to the commission of old men but they reject her conclusions with outrage -- all of them are invested in the girl's sanctity -- and the nun also refuses to support her desperate efforts to save the dying girl.  Finally, Elizabeth comes up with a scheme to convince the girl that she has died and been reborn as another child not burdened with the horrific secrets afflicting Anna.  This ruse succeeds and the film has a happy ending of sorts -- the nurse burns down the family home to conceal the fact that she has spirited away the child, escaping to Australia where, if the gloomy mood of the film is to continue, the protagonists will undoubtedly encounter indigenous victims of genocide and suffer plagues of toads and wild fires.  The film has a frame:  at the outset, we see the movie set and soundstage and the actor (Florence Pugh) who plays Nurse Elizabeth reminds us that the narrative is just a story but that human beings live (and die) by stories; at the end of the film, the camera tracks with a waiter who walks offstage briskly revealing Ms. Pugh, clad in sleek, funereal black, and staring at the camera:  she says "in out in out", a reference to a kind of zoetrope that Anna views in the film and that shows a bird both within and outside of a cage -- you spin the image on a coiled spring-like wire and the rotating picture, by virtue of persistence of vision shows a bird that sometimes seems to be in a cage and sometimes is free.  The idea is that we are both liberated and confined by the stories that we tell about ourselves.  A story can lead us to freedom but it is equally possible that the narrative that we have constructed will end up as a prison.  (There is an annoying notion in contemporary cinema that if we give people narratives that empower people they will somehow be free -- the Black Panther superhero franchise is based on this questionable concept; The Wonder is less sanguine about the liberating power of stories -- in this film, the characters are all trapped by the narrative that the Irish family has constructed to repress certain horrible aspects of their life; the story becomes inescapable to the extent that Anna and her mother sacrifice themselves to it.  In one of his aphorisms, Kafka says:  "A cage went in search of a bird.")

The film is based on a novel by Emma Donohue, a specialist in narratives that are disturbing, even horrific -- the film and novel The Room is the product of her imagination:  that story involved a mother and child confined by a sexual psychopath in a subterranean room for many years.  The Wonder indicts all the usual suspects:  the commission of old men represents the patriarchy at its most grisly, old gents who conspire together to destroy the little girl; the patriarchy is aided and abetted by the more medieval elements of the Catholic church and the landed elites -- the landlord for the tenant bog farmer who is Anna's father has a vested interest in establishing that there is a saint living on his leasehold.  A nasty old doctor, a quack, wants to prove theories of animal magnetism, photosynthesis, and the existence of the fountain of youth on the dying girl.  The bad guys are all awful and, rather, predictably, there is a component of sexual abuse to the story as well.  The movie is effectively shot -- the cottage where the bog farmer lives is an isolated abode (it's called a "cabin" in the film) in the middle of a blasted heath that looks like something described by one of the Bronte sisters -- it's all grey and brown heath, dwarf trees, and barren green hills, some of spiked like pyramids.  The dying girl's mother is filmed sitting in a trench full of water where she has been cutting black turf.  The interiors are all impoverished, cold and nasty-looking.  The camerawork is very good but not intrusive -- the director Sebastian Lelio doesn't want to impose on his story any gratuitous beauty.  The action in the film is mostly nasty:  Anna's tooth falls out, there's some close-up vomiting, and, at one point, the nurse jams a feeding tube about three yards into the little girl's body.  A posthumous picture of Anna's brother who has died has been painted with open eyes on his closed eyelids -- it's a startling image that shocks the viewer and really belongs in a horror film (although it's arguable that this picture is a kind of horror film).  Elizabeth is usually shown eating, probably some kind of hideous stew or gruel -- these shots serve as counterpoint to the little girl's anorexia.  Anna has an uncanny, cadaverous radiance -- she's usually shown in white, standing like an apparition in the chilly exteriors.  Even the sex scene between Elizabeth and the journalist is filmed as a brutish encounter -- the act looks positively unpleasant and uncomfortable.  The sex scene, as well as images of the London journalist leading a big black horse across the moor, seem to be gratuitous but, in fact, the movie is very well-written and everything fits together in a grim, but carefully engineered, manner.