the wonders movie review

“We are nothing without stories, and so we invite you to believe in this one.” Sebastian Lelio’s fascinating “The Wonder” opens with a prologue that includes this line, one that’s crucial to unpacking the film that follows. Working with co-writers Alice Birch & Emma Donoghue to adapt Donoghue’s novel, Lelio doesn’t just want you to passively watch the story of what’s to come. It’s not an invitation to hear or see this story, but to believe in this one. Lelio is less concerned about the practical truths and lies of “The Wonder” than he is about what they mean, what they say about humanity, and how they interrogate what we believe.

Pugh plays Lib Wright, an English nurse in the year 1862, a year when the mass famine of the 1840s has left scars across the Irish landscape to which she travels. She has been summoned there by a committee looking for answers about a local girl who appears to be a miracle—one that includes arguably underwritten characters played by Toby Jones , Ciaran Hinds , and Brian F. O’Byrne. Nine-year-old Anna O’Donnell (the excellent Kila Lord Cassidy) has not eaten in four months. She claims to subsist only on manna from heaven, and her survival has led to worshippers who want to confer with this potential saint. Her mother Rosaleen (Cassidy’s actual mother Elaine) insists that there is no trickery here, but Lib’s job will be to watch Anna to see if food is somehow being snuck into her bedroom. A journalist named William ( Tom Burke ) has also traveled there to fuel Lib’s skepticism, and it’s no coincidence that both the writer and the nurse have brought the grief of loss in their baggage.

Lib is constantly being told, “You are only here to watch.” She is the observer, just like us. There are fascinating bookends to this story that reaches too far in terms of form but it’s interesting to see a piece that’s about faith and skepticism in equal measure be so directly confrontational with its audience. Naturally, Lib’s instinct begins where most viewers would—doubtful that Anna isn’t eating and then increasingly concerned about her declining physical state. Pugh takes us on a journey with her from skepticism to concern and “The Wonder” becomes a study of empathy and action. How long can we be expected to just “watch” when the life of a child is in danger? How long can we stay inactive when faith is destructive enough to tear communities and families apart?

A drama this ambitious demands a fearless performer like Pugh, who knows exactly the tightrope to walk when it comes to the story’s delicate balance between realism and melodrama. Pugh can’t lean too far into the emotional or risk turning “The Wonder” into a more traditional melodrama, the kind of thing that’s easier to place in a box and walk away from. Lelio doesn’t want that. He wants viewers to feel as unsettled as Lib, who becomes increasingly unmoored as she realizes she has either been asked to bear witness to a miracle or the death of a child. Lib’s uncertainty is enhanced by an excellent score by Lelio’s regular composer Matthew Herbert that avoids the lilt common to period pieces in favor of something more uncomfortable. And the phenomenal Ari Wegner (“ The Power of the Dog ”) shoots the film with a gloomy, gray palette that almost makes it look like a horror flick.

There are times when Lelio is a bit unsure of his ambition, falling back on a more traditional pace and rhythm, but he always gets back to the more interesting version of “The Wonder” that ultimately comes together. Burke’s journalist character is also woefully underwritten, a part that’s like a plot device here instead of a rich counterpart to Lib. He’s not bad but he’s frustratingly stuck in terms of character. Burke is always an intriguing performer, but this film falters a bit when he’s around as if he’s invading the space between Anna and Lib instead of enhancing it.

Even if its questions of faith don’t intrigue Netflix subscribers, the performances will. Lelio has proven himself to be a consistently phenomenal director of actresses, drawing great work from Daniela Vega (“ A Fantastic Woman ”), Julianne Moore (“ Gloria Bell ”), and Rachel McAdams (“ Disobedience ”). We can now add Pugh (and Cassidy really) to that list as another woman who is consistently asked by the men of this film to step aside and merely observe. She starts merely watching, but she ends the movie with a different kind of resolve, one that comes from her unshakeable belief.

In limited theatrical release today and on Netflix on November 16 th .

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

• Kíla Lord Cassidy as Anna O'Donnell
• Florence Pugh as Lib Wright
• Tom Burke as William Byrne
• Niamh Algar as Kitty
• Elaine Cassidy as Rosaleen O'Donnell
• Toby Jones as Dr. McBrearty
• Ciarán Hinds as
• Dermot Crowley as
• Alice Birch
• Sebastián Lelio

Cinematographer

Writer (based on the novel by).

• Emma Donoghue
• Kristina Hetherington
• Matthew Herbert

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The Wonder Reviews

This adaptation of Emma Donoghue's 2016 novel centres on Pugh's reliably great performance, though its big reveal does fail to wow.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 11, 2024

It is a heavy film with tough questions, yet Florence Pugh is up for the challenge as always.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 15, 2024

A film that fully leans into what makes it work.

Full Review | Jul 14, 2024

The Wonder doesn’t instill “wonder,” nor enjoyment.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Mar 6, 2024

Much like the movie sets it depicts in its meta opening, The Wonder is similarly just an empty framework — narrative scaffolding that is never given life and a central purpose by its abridged storytelling.

Full Review | Nov 2, 2023

Based on Emma Donoghue’s eponymous book, The Wonder is a beautiful yet disturbing psychological thriller with a stellar performance by Florence Pugh.

Full Review | Oct 4, 2023

The Wonder is a mesmerising movie that finds the central character’s unshakable faith being broken and instils curious stories to be investigated.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2023

The Wonder drives its heavy themes home ever so eloquently, resulting in a worthy adaptation that won’t be easy to forget, no fewer thanks to its powerhouse cast.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 26, 2023

The Wonder is a bleak tale of an unexpected connection between two people well acquainted with hardship. Pugh’s performance, as always, elevates this to something beyond a religious period piece mystery about life itself.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

A gritty tale exploring religion vs science that is helmed by a masterful lead performance by Florence Pugh, The Wonder is definitely worth a watch and may nearly pack as much of a punch as the book.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 24, 2023

The sunless landscape that’s being blasted by wind 24×7. The creaking and dreary insides of the houses. The spine-chilling score. The constant glare of kids or elders watching our protagonist. The lack of any warmth between humans. It’s all horror 101.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 20, 2023

Pugh's performance, which dovetails nicely with newcomer Cassidy’s devout determination as Anna, can’t quite overcome the uneven plotting and, at times, flimsy characterisation.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 17, 2023

Oddly though, the contemporary framing device feels even more superfluous when it returns for the final shot.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 20, 2023

Lelio shows an exceptional management of tone and the way he captures and uses his period setting enhances the story in a number of ways. He also knows what he has in Florence Pugh whose standout performance is both thoughtful and haunting.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 7, 2023

Florence Pugh is perfect in this film by Sebastian Lelio about religious obsession and those skeptical of it.

Full Review | Jan 31, 2023

The film tacitly frames faith and science as both “stories” with sincere, devoted adherents. But it leaves no doubt as to which story we should prefer.

Full Review | Jan 27, 2023

We are left with two possibilities: The Wonder is a deeply cynical artifact, or it's entirely clueless about itself. It's hard to say which is more depressing.

Haunting and atmospheric, director Sebastián Lelio's film operates between faith and evidence.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 29, 2022

Lelio (“Disobedience,” “Gloria”) continues his reverence for strong women through Pugh’s haunting portrayal of Lib, a stoic lady who does not suffer fools.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Dec 28, 2022

Florence Pugh confronts uncertainty and skepticism in this piercing drama that questions the power of stories, faith, and freedom. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 20, 2022

‘The Wonder’ Is This Year’s Other Florence Pugh Drama — The Good One

• By David Fear

The very first thing you see in The Wonder, a historical drama set in 19th-century Ireland, is not the rolling green plains of the nation’s countryside. It’s not Dublin’s muddy, sooty streets, nor the dark-lit taverns where bearded men curse and drink ale or the rural family cottage wherein a miracle may or may not be taking place. We’ll get to bask in the splendor of those backdrops soon enough.

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Still with us? Great, let’s go on. Wright has been summoned from London in order to observe a girl suffering from a peculiar predicament. Upon her 11th birthday, Anna O’Donnell (Kíla Lord Cassidy) stopped eating. She’s now refused food for four months, but does not seem to be ill, consisting off what she calls “manna from heaven.” Some think the girl has been touched by the hand of God, which has made her a bit of a tourist attraction and the object of fascination for a visiting journalist ( The Souvenir ‘s Tom Burke). A local committee of doctors, clergymen, and your run-of-the-mill muttonchopped authority figures have asked a nun and Nurse Wright to respectively keep watch over the child. Neither can confer with each other. They must work in separate shifts and see if there’s some sort of rational explanation or indeed a higher power at work.

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The whole notion of making up narratives to make sense of the world is what The Wonder wants us to contemplate, and that Brechtian fist-bump of it entering — and, spoiler alert, exiting — by showing us the scene behind the scenes is only the most upfront example. Every character processes their view of the events via a story; the narrator turns out to be a character, casting her eyes at us in a complicit way around the halfway point; Burke’s journalist tells stories for a living in the name of the Fourth Estate, and some of them are even true. It’s not a coincidence that, in order to try and win Anna’s favor, he shows her a thaumatrope, a coin which twirls quickly and works via images that appear to movie thanks to persistence of vision — a primitive example of a medium that will soon become the prime mode of storytelling in the 20th century.

Does all of this sound like some sort chin-scratching-to-head-scratching intellectual exercise to you? No one would blame you if you prefer your gothic-lit tales straight with no meta-chaser. Yet, largely thanks to Pugh, Leilo’s semi-experimental attempt at blending an old-fashioned melodrama with Media Studies 101 commentary never makes you feel like you’re watching something created in a dorm-session smokeout. Pugh knows that stories need protagonists to follow, and she gives you a great one: spiky, sullen, sensitive, enraged, grieving, lustful, loving, nurturing, and not prone to taking prisoners or any shit. And when it’s time for her nurse to make all of the storytelling that has hurt her ward come to end, she does so in an oddly satisfying, if somewhat extended climax. It’s a movie that begins and ends with a wink. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a tear in your eye as well.

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The Wonder review: An atmospheric tale of faith versus medicine

Florence Pugh plays a 19th-century nurse fighting Catholic mysticism with medical facts in Netflix's austere period drama.

"Anna O'Donnell doesn't eat." That's all a nurse named Elizabeth Wright ( Florence Pugh ) has been told — not that her medical training allows her to believe it for a moment — and why she's been summoned from London to a remote village in Ireland in Sebastián Lelio 's moody, cloistered drama (in limited release now, and on Netflix Nov. 16).

It's 1862, not far out from the Great Famine, and the sight of a British citizen in any kind of uniform is still not particularly welcome by the locals. The feeling is mutual: Elizabeth, or Lib, as she eventually allows her young patient to call her, doesn't know why she's been brought to this impoverished backwater for a case that clearly seems to be based on faith, not science, or whether it's even worth trying to assert her expertise in a place where a woman's word is hardly taken more seriously than a dog's.

But still she agrees to observe 11-year-old Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy) for two weeks without interfering, splitting shifts with a nearly silent nun brought in to share the duties (Why a nun? Lib asks; "Welcome to Ireland," comes the wry reply). And Anna seems like a sweet girl, if an unusually devout one; she survives, she promises Lib beatifically, on "manna from heaven," more soul-filling than any earthly sustenance. That's impossible, of course, though the panel of local (and naturally all-male) grandees in charge of the investigation, including an officious doctor ( Toby Jones ) and the O'Donnell's solemn parish priest (an underused Ciarán Hinds ), each have their own more or less ridiculous theories.

The longer Lib spends circling the girl's secret, the further she feels from the source, though she finds that hard to convey to the journalist at her boarding house who's also come up from London determined to ferret out the truth, a rakish disbeliever named William Byrne ( The Souvenir 's Tom Burke, whose character seems to be the only one halfway enjoying himself in this town.) To the villagers who come to pay tribute, or merely bask in the presence of a sanctified child who appears to have her own direct line to God, Anna is "a jewel, a wonder"; to William, she's a "wee faker."

For Lib, she's a puzzle to be solved and then slowly, an object of real sympathy. Maybe that has something to do with her own pain; in public, she's brusque and guarded, but alone in her room at night, the woman who has ensured her hosts that she's a childless widow enacts a strange ritual, one that involves the careful, almost sacred placement of a little pair of knitted baby booties and a spoonful of some heavy syrup (laudanum? heroin?) that makes her swoon.

There have been numerous books and think pieces about the 19th-century phenomenon of so-called "fasting girls" — mostly adolescents caught up in a religious fervor, or more likely, merely chafing at the narrow confines of their Victorian lives. Novelist Emma Donoghue ( Room ) based her 2016 novel The Wonder on one of those stories, and its subject matter seems like ripe fodder for Lelio, the Oscar-winning Chilean auteur whose gift for inhabiting the female gaze was crystallized in films like Gloria , A Fantastic Woman , and Disobedience . The sumptuous cinematography, by Ari Wegner ( The Power of the Dog , Zola ), makes the landscape look like a Brönte novel, full of windswept moors and flickering, fire-lit shadows. Pugh, too, is pretty much perfectly cast, an actress with such a keen emotional presence that she tends to cut through pretense and triviality like a hot knife.

The script, though, feels both less bold and less fully formed than its central star's performance, and Lelio chooses for reasons unknown to frame it all through a meta modern lens — bookending the movie with a self-conscious narration about "telling stories" and pulling back to reveal the studio set, with all its scaffolding and wires and backlot detritus. It's an odd choice (aren't all movies stories?) and not a particularly organic one for a filmmaker whose vision with his own material has been so distinct and intimate. Instead, Wonder 's spare, muted intrigue hangs mostly on Pugh and atmosphere, an elusive minor-key mystery. Grade: B

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‘The Wonder’ Review: Florence Pugh Stuns as a Woman of Science in a Community of Faith

The director of “A Fantastic Woman” and the author of “Room” find a vehicle that perfectly blends their sensibilities

This review originally ran September 2, 2022, in conjunction with the film’s world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival.

You’ll need to have faith in your core to be swept away by Sebastián Lelio’s lovely and elegiac “The Wonder,” a mournful and textured psychodrama that gently nurses one into hope and spiritual serenity.

But not a religious kind of faith, to be clear: You’ll just need to believe in, or at least gradually come to accept, the power of stories as a means of survival.

A deeply feminine tale of fortitude with heart and teeth, “The Wonder” (making its world premiere at the 2022 Telluride Film Festival) hints at this very suggestion right at the start — perhaps a tad too expressly — and opens on what looks like a contemporary film stage. As the camera pans, it unveils the yarn’s eventual setting, the impoverished Irish Midlands of the 19 th Century, haunted by unspeakable grief under the recent shadow of the Great Famine.

As if to tell a bedtime story, a voiceover softly requests us to consider the complete devotion in which the dwellers of “The Wonder” believe in their own truths. As we’d soon find out, one side would be charged by mathematical facts and modern science; the other, by Catholic faith.

Lib Wright (the astonishing Florence Pugh, in a delicately searing performance) is firmly in science’s corner as a top English Nightingale summoned to a remote Irish village for a well-paying yet mysterious duty. After an arduous journey across seas and sweeping landscapes of mist and sward, all cuddled by the masterful Ari Wegner’s dewy cinematography of muted, buttery watercolors, the nurse faces an all-male panel of the town’s bigwigs, including the likes of Doctor McBrearty (Toby Jones) and landowner John Flynn (Brian F. O’Byrne).

Leading the committee is Ciarán Hinds’ imposing Priest Father Thaddeus, who guides Lib through her two-week assignment. She is hired to watch — and only to watch — the town’s famous 11-year-old Anna O’Donnell (a sensational Kíla Lord Cassidy in a breakthrough role), who hasn’t had any food for four months since her last birthday and yet still shows no signs of weakness or starvation.

Overwhelmed by nosy tourists and insistent journalists, the group simply wants to know whether the girl is a miracle or a fraud. Learning that she’d share shifts with a nun named Sister Michael (Josie Walker), “Why a nun?” inquires the science-minded Lib, understandably rejecting the possibility of divine intervention. “Welcome to Ireland,” is the loaded response she gets. In another scene that contrasts Lib’s contemporary ways against the devout town she dismisses as “backwards,” Lib fires, “I need facts, not stories,” when told that Anna’s last meal was the body of Christ. She indifferently notes down, “wafer.”

Adapted from “Room” author Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel by Alice Birch, Lelio and Donoghue herself, “The Wonder” builds all its characters and their conflicting dilemmas patiently and compassionately, especially once the bedridden and angelically porcelain Anna enters the tale with her sweet and tranquil demeanor. Donoghue is a master when it comes not only to engaging with resilient feminine headspace, but also surveying a child’s inner world; understanding how little ones cope, adapt, transform and are reborn — that much we know from “Room.”

Meanwhile, Lelio is a maestro of portraying womanly strength and tenacity, as demonstrated through his impressive streak of “Gloria,” “A Fantastic Woman” and “Disobedience,” all telling stories that pit women against the perils of masculine bile, tradition and religion. In that regard, you can’t help but feel that there couldn’t have been a more fitting match between the curiosities of an author and filmmaker, while witnessing the cozy cadence in which Anna and Lib warm up to one another.

Each touched by their own familial grief and trauma, the duo comes with personal and domestic secrets that “The Wonder” skillfully takes its time to disclose, in rooms Lelio and Wegner (“The Power of the Dog”) light with shades of baroque, painterly chiaroscuro. Anna chirps lightly and prays to no end for her deceased brother, insisting that “manna” from heaven ensures her survival. Frustrated by the girl’s stubbornly religious family (the brittle yet resolute Elaine Cassidy is especially outstanding as the mother), Lib on the other hand gives everything she’s got to listening to and comprehending Anna, who often tells her, “You don’t understand us.”

Because she’s convinced that Anna is being fed in secret, Lib treats the situation like a detective case to be cracked. In a frantic and devastating violation of trust one day, she regretfully tries to shove food down the weakening little one’s throat. (During this masterful, tear-jerker of a scene, expect to secretly wish for Lib’s success while desperately wanting her to stop all the same.) Ultimately, nothing works on the fragile girl, who continues to believe in a spiritual kind of nourishment despite her deteriorating health.

Has Anna been brainwashed? Is she being used as a religious pawn by benefit seekers? It’s not until the persistent journalist Will (Tom Burke) finally breaks Lib and convinces her to collaborate with him that secrets crack wide open. As a person with closer leanings to faith than Lib and also a tragic past, he serves as a logical bridge in the tale; one who finds and connects the missing pieces of the two sides.

Divulging what the pair discovers would betray the serene rhythm that Lelio and his editor Kristina Hetherington (“The Duke”) establish throughout. Just know that the film possibly gains something from reading Donoghue’s book after seeing the screen adaptation. Then again, it perhaps loses a little something, too; you can’t help but feel a smidgen of hurry when Will and Lib fall into each other’s arms in a moment of need and assume a more luxuriously teased chemistry throughout the pages of the book.

Regardless, what a visual, aural and philosophical feat “The Wonder” is as a cinematic examination of empathy and truth, faith and reason, and pride and identity. Every aesthetic decision here complements the film’s searching qualities, from Matthew Herbert’s echoey score of dreamy sounds and pregnant screeches — the screaming sorts you’d perhaps hear in a dream or nature — to frequent use of central framing that emphasizes Lib’s growing isolation and desperation. Delivering a towering performance in a budding career already full of them, Pugh especially leaves a memorable trace as Lib tries to get inside Anna’s head, agitatedly sweeping the muddy earth with her “Lady Macbeth”–adjacent garbs in one moment, quietly sinking into her own demons in the next with a softening façade.

It would be too simplistic to summarize “The Wonder” solely as a lesson on the shortcomings of blind faith and organized religion. A more rewarding engagement is to see it as an exercise on listening with humility. In the end, Lelio earns the powerful close of “The Wonder” with every temperate turn. His film, a career-best, departs like a birdsong, with an optimistic finale as perfect and revelatory as they come.

“The Wonder” opens in select U.S. theaters Nov. 2 and premieres on Netflix Nov. 16.

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‘The Wonder’ Review: Florence Pugh Discovers a Miracle

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Telluride Film Festival. Netflix releases the film in select theaters on Friday, November 4 and to its streaming platform on Wednesday, November 16.

Considering that Sebastián Lelio ’s “ The Wonder ” is a religious mystery (of sorts) set in the Irish Midlands circa 1862, the first shot of the film is so wildly unexpected that audiences might fear that the projectionist has played the wrong file. We open, not on the foggy moors of a country still reeling from the Great Famine that had starved it to death some 13 years earlier, but rather in the cavernous space of a modern soundstage — the kind of facility that might house the sets for a period drama like this one. It looks more like a logo of a production company than it does the opening image of a movie. Only when a disembodied voice starts talking to us over the soundtrack are we able to make sense of what we’re watching.

“Hello,” it says with a comforting softness, “This is the beginning of a film called ‘The Wonder.’” At this point, I half-expected the film to channel Traffuat’s “Fahrenheit 451” and have the voice read out the full credits — to announce that the sumptuous but slightly undercooked tale we’re about to see has been adapted from a 2016 novel by “Room” author Emma Donoghue, and features Tom Burke playing against type as a well-meaning journalist whose delicious muttonchops threaten to swallow his entire face — but her voiceover soon proves to be less interested in details than ideas.

“We are nothing without stories,” it continues, “so we invite you to believe in this one.” Then Ari Wegner’s camera swivels around to find the actress sitting in a set made to look like the interior of a boat, and with nothing but a push-in and a splash of water through the floorboards the illusion is complete. Belief, we’re viscerally reminded, can be transformative.

It’s a gambit more compelling than much of the film that follows, but also one that enriches it; it tells you where to focus your attention when no-nonsense English nurse Lib Wright ( Florence Pugh ) arrives in Ireland to witness the miracle child Anna O’Donnell (newcomer Kíla Lord Cassidy), an 11-year-old girl in good health who supposedly hasn’t eaten anything for more than four months. Lib has been summoned to the Midlands by an impeccable phalanx of Irish and British character actors (including Ciarán Hinds and Toby Jones), who’ve hired the nurse — and a nun along with her — to watch Anna around the clock for two solid weeks, in the hopes that this tag-team of observers might determine the validity of her claim. Between a woman of medicine and a woman of faith, the local patriarchy looks forward to getting a clear answer they can immediately ignore because it came from two women.

If not for that odd framing device, you might have reason to see “The Wonder” as a story in which saints and scams are mutually exclusive, but the introduction filters the entire film through a lens that refracts it into a story that has nothing to do with God, and everything to do with belief. At no point does Lib seriously entertain the idea that Anna might actually be fed by “manna from heaven,” and at no point does Donoghue’s script — co-authored by Lelio and “Lady Macbeth” writer Alice Birch — reduce the plot to a cheap parlor game. But the fact that there’s no magic at work doesn’t necessarily mean that a miracle can’t occur.

“The Wonder” is rich with small examples that serve an even greater one. They begin with the film’s ultra-evocative look and design, which needs only a handful of (admittedly fake!) locations and a few Caravaggio-like shots of Lib skulking around the village inn to paint a vivid picture of grief and despair. Everyone we meet is attended to by one or more ghosts from the famine, and so it’s no wonder that people would be eager to believe in the rumors of a girl who doesn’t need to eat.

Matthew Herbert’s strange and ingenious score, filled with loud whacks of percussion and wisps of ascendant human voices, adds to the sense of being surrounded by lost souls; so do the white flecks that flicker like fireflies across Wegner’s Andrew Wyeth-inspired visions of the moors, the result of transmutating her digital footage onto celluloid film before scanning it for the color grade. Anything seems possible — except for when Lib is watching over Anna, and the unmistakable reality of a simple child being coerced into nonsense by her desperate mother (played by Elaine Cassidy, Kíla Lord Cassidy’s actual mother) clicks back into focus.

Steely as ever, while still allowing Lib a tragic undercurrent of her own, Pugh is excellent in her scenes with the younger Cassidy, but there’s a gear missing from the time these characters spend together. Where there should be a measure of tension between the nurse’s doubt and her subject’s unwavering belief, instead there’s only a fussy mix of secrets and pity. Even the hot and heavy relationship that Lib rushes into with Burke’s leery journalist — sad and sweet and even a little bit funny for how it betrays a mutual need for expiation — struggles to escape the shadow of the ideas that it’s meant to represent. Impressive as it is that “The Wonder” is able to squeeze so much from its spartan trappings, the film still feels clipped at 110 minutes; there may not be a lot to chew on, but there’s almost too much to savor.

It’s only in the last third of the film, once all the cards are on the table, that “The Wonder” is truly able to reach for the divine while delivering on the terms that it sets for itself at the outset. Religion may be no different than any of the other stories we tell ourselves in order to survive, but it can be uniquely indicative of their power over us. And, by extension, it can also be instructive as to the power they give us over ourselves in return.

When one of the characters in this story laments believing someone who told her that “love is forever,” there’s no mistaking how that belief was strong enough to bridge the gap between heaven and hell. “The Wonder” often skims along the surface when it should cut deeper, but the film’s obviousness only holds it back for so long. By the time it reaches its final shot — inevitably closing the clever parenthetical opened by its first — you just might believe every word of it, too.

“The Wonder” premiered at the 2022 Telluride Film Festival. Netflix will release it in theaters in November, and streaming on Netflix in December.

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The Wonder review: Florence Pugh is at home in this beguiling period drama – with a controversial beginning

Past the odd – and already critically divisive – opening, this period drama is a sincere exploration of faith and truth.

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Dir: Sebastián Lelio. Starring: Florence Pugh, Tom Burke, Kíla Lord Cassidy, Elaine Cassidy, Caolán Byrne, Niamh Algar, Toby Jones, Ciarán Hinds. 15, 108 minutes.

Watching The Wonder on Netflix , you’ll think you’ve clicked on the wrong film. The beguiling period drama starring Florence Pugh opens not in Ireland’s boglands as promised by the trailer, but in the harsh light of a film studio. A disembodied voice ( Niamh Algar ’s) will reassure you that this is indeed The Wonder . The voice continues: “The people you are about to meet, the characters, believe in their stories with complete devotion. We are nothing without stories. So we invite you to believe in this one.”

It’s an odd, and already critically divisive, beginning. The film sees director Sebastián Lelio and screenwriter Alice Birch (known for her work on Succession and Normal People ) take on Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel of the same name. It should be said that nothing about Donoghue’s book particularly invites this narrative framework (the film ends back at the same sterile place) but Leilo and Birch have latched on to it, nonetheless. The reasons behind their peculiar choice reveal themselves slowly but persuasively.

The camera, eventually, closes in on a dark and dingy passenger ship, in which sits Pugh’s Lib Wright. The year is 1862. Lib is an English nurse called across the sea to Ireland, to verify a miracle. An 11-year-old girl, Anna O’Donnell (Kíla Lord Cassidy), has lived without food for four months. Lib is there only to report what she sees and hears, not to offer her diagnosis. The debate of faith versus science is to be left to the men of the village (played in part by Toby Jones , Brian F O’Byrne, and Ciarán Hinds). Has Anna been nurtured by magnetism? Photosynthesis? Molecules of scent? Or, as she claims, “manna from heaven”?

The truth of Anna’s self-sustaining starvation means little to the story. Neither is it all that hard to guess. The Wonder , instead, relies on the enigmatic discomfort of being drawn into another person’s darkest secret. As Lib becomes closer to the girl, her suspicions grow. And this is a land so scarred by famine that even the charming journalist (Tom Burke) who turns up to write about Anna, hides a mournful tether to the place. Cinematographer Ari Wegner frames Pugh like she’s a mouse crawling in the rafters, small and easily consumed by the shadows. Meanwhile, Matthew Herbert’s score, jarringly but effectively modern in tone, rumbles away beneath like a digestive system of levers and gears.

The film may take a stand against religious hypocrisy – and particularly the carelessness with which lives are supplanted by agendas – but it does so without vilifying those who see faith as a tool for survival. A veteran of the Crimean War, Lib considers it a great privilege to spend time with those on their deathbeds. “They talk,” she says. “They tell their stories.”

Pugh is very much at home in this kind of role, but it’s no less arresting in its familiarity. There’s a certain steadfastness there, a sense of internal resolution, that not only allowed her to walk away from the hubbub around Don’t Worry Darling entirely untouched, but let her skip through the Marvel Cinematic Universe as its newest Black Widow without a care in the world. Lib, despite assiduously devoting herself to the factual world of medicine, has her own nightly ritual to assuage the grief of a lost child. Every evening, she pricks her finger, like manmade stigmata, and sinks into an opium-induced blackout. The Wonder ’s strange opening then begins to make sense; it is a reminder that the only truths to exist are the ones which we construct for ourselves.

‘The Wonder’ is streaming on Netflix now

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The Wonder Review

02 Nov 2022

Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio prides himself on telling the formidable stories of unassuming women. From Julianne Moore ’s effervescent  Julia  to Daniela Vega’s breakout moment in  A Fantastic Woman , here is a man determined to shine a light on mysterious female stories – an ambition that peaks with eerie period horror  The Wonder .

It’s a slow burn, and an exercise in faith in more ways than one. But Florence Pugh impresses once more — this feels like the tipping point to call her this generation’s most impressive British actor — as a Yorkshire nurse tasked with observing a young girl refusing to eat in a pious 19th-century Irish village. Pugh walks a delicate tightrope between commitment and frustration, expressed through her unique brand of simmering contempt, and is in good company alongside Tom Burke as a fascinated journalist also trying to figure out the truth.

The story, adapted from Emma Donoghue’s novel of the same name, smartly wrestles with the despair and uncertainty felt by many after the Great Famine in Ireland. It’s bleak, rarely outright entertaining stuff, but Lelio pushes through to find a glimmer of hope in it all – as he regularly does with the women he champions.

It never quite goes as far as it could with the otherworldliness.

There is certainly a greater exercise in genre than Leilo's previous work, flirting with horror and the supernatural as Lib almost loses her grip on what’s real, and the film ponders just how long faith can keep you alive. But it never quite goes as far as it could with the otherworldliness; Lelio is a humanist filmmaker, and his greatest strength has always been the human emotion he paints with.

It’s thoughtful but slow, asking the audience — literally, with Niamh Algar narrating the film’s fourth wall-breaking bookends — to “believe in stories with complete devotion,” like these characters do.  The Wonder  searches for compassion in a cold, hungry world – the answers might just take a minute to digest.

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The wonder review: florence pugh is the miracle in netflix's haunting movie.

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Florence Pugh has proven she can dominate the screen no matter the strength of the film behind her. Earlier this year, she starred in Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling and carried that film through sheer force of will. In The Wonder , directed by Sebastián Lelio ( Gloria Bell , A Fantastic Woman ), Pugh does something similar while having much more to work with. The Wonder may buckle under lofty ideas the film seems reticent to explore with the religious fervor its subject would call for, but it is a beautiful and haunting film thanks to the impeccable behind-the-scenes talent and Pugh's magnetism. Still, The Wonder will leave many wanting more when it comes to what lurks beneath its fascinating story.

Pugh plays Lib Wright, an English nurse called to a remote Irish village to watch over Anna O'Donnell (Kila Lord Cassidy), a young girl who has not eaten anything since her 11th birthday but is still miraculously alive. In eight-hour shifts, Lib and one other woman, a nun named Sister Michael (Josie Walker), are to watch Anna and report their findings to a local council at the end of a two-week period. Lib is naturally skeptical, searching every crook and crevice in the O’Donnell home for hidden food. The less scientifically inclined members of the village believe they are witnessing a miracle and Lib becomes hellbent on proving them wrong as journalists, believers, and non-believers descend on the village.

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The Wonder is an eerie film, and Matthew Herbert’s score evokes an unnerving chill as Ari Wegner’s camera glides over a lush but sparse Irish landscape. Wegner (whose recent work includes The Power of the Dog , an equally haunting film ) has the camera floating in and out of village homes and over the windswept tundra, acting as a ghost itself, an unseen miracle siding with Lib and her determination to root out the O’Donnell family’s potential fraud.

The script, which is adapted by Emma Donoghue from her own 2016 novel, rightly stays with Lib's perspective as she battles a traumatic past and a village that would rather her not be there at all. The English nurse is faced with all sorts of pushback while trying to do her job, a tough prospect for anyone, let alone a woman being overseen by a council of men who do not trust her, regardless of whether they are men of faith or science. The harsh landscape only serves to compound these issues, as does the nun also sent to watch over Anna. Lib is not to confer with her to make sure their findings are unbiased, but there’s a coldness to Sister Michael and Walker's staunch performance that adds to the unsettling nature of the task at hand.

Unfortunately, The Wonder isn’t all too interested in this task, overlooking the battle between faith and fact for more interpersonal interests as well as a romantic subplot that would feel unnecessary save for its usefulness in The Wonder ’s ending. It’s an ending that feels more like a deus ex machina than an earned development, but once again, Pugh is the film’s saving grace, as is a scene of Lib confronting the council with her findings.

In the way Pugh holds the film together, so too does Leilo and Wegner’s work. The supporting cast also does tremendous work with what little they're given, including Tom Burke, Ciarán Hinds, Toby Jones, Niamh Algar, and more rounding out the ensemble. For all their work in making The Wonder an atmospheric feat about miracles and the damage they can do, though, The Wonder ’s concept ultimately goes unexplored. This could be forgiven if the subtext weren't laid bare early on with the mention of Ireland's Great Famine and the clear connection to the "fasting girls" of the Victorian era. There may be few miracles in The Wonder , but it's clear that Pugh is one unto herself.

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The Wonder premiered on Netflix Wednesday, November 16. The film is 108 minutes long and rated R for some sexuality.

Based on the novel Room by Emma Donoghue, The Wonder tells the tale of a young girl in the Irish Midlands in the 1800s who is perceived as a saint based on miraculous events surrounding her. Florence Pugh plays nurse Lib Wright, who is sent to examine a girl who stopped eating but remains healthy. The girl, anna O'Donnell, is subjected to visitors across the land as people come to see the mysterious saintly child, but others believe she may be tied to something more sinister. The Wonder is a psychological thriller that pits love vs. evil as Lib and Anna grow closer despite the events surrounding them. 

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