Film Review: The Wonder places faith against a post-Famine Ireland backdrop
Kíla Lord Cassidy as Anna O'Donnell, Tom Burke as Will Byrne, Florence Pugh as Lib Wright in The Wonder.
- The Wonder
- ★★★★☆
The Famine casts a long shadow over (15A), which opens in 1862 in a Wicklow village, to which English nurse Lib Wright (Florence Pugh) has been summoned to observe Anna O’Donnell (Kíla Lord Cassidy), a child who hasn’t eaten for four months and yet seems to be thriving on a diet of fresh air.
Is Anna’s survival a miracle, as a local committee headed by Dr McBrearty (Toby Jones) and Father Thaddeus (Ciaran Hinds) seem to hope? Or is there an unholy conspiracy at play?
Adapted from Emma Donoghue’s novel and directed by Sebastian Lelio, The Wonder asks some very interesting questions about our relationship to faith and offers no easy answers. The sceptical Nurse Wright is something of an avatar for a modern audience, ceaselessly poking into Anna’s life to discover the ruse by which (or so she believes) the public is being deceived, but gradually coming to accept the intensity of Anna’s devotion on its own terms — the child might well be a pawn in a much bigger game as the Church seeks to re-establish its authority in the wake of the Great Hunger, but there is no doubting the sincerity of her faith.
The chemistry between Florence Pugh and Kíla Lord Cassidy is crucial here, and both deliver excellent performances: Pugh, who has had a turbulent but successful year already, is wholly relatable as a pragmatic professional who is secretly a sensualist as she self-medicates against her private pain with tinctures of opium, while newcomer Lord Cassidy is by turns gauche and self-assured, which is exactly how we imagine a 19th-century Irish child might behave when thrust into the spotlight as a saint-in-waiting.
There’s a strong supporting cast too, with Hinds and Jones — terrific as the self-deluded local quack — joined by Tom Burke, Niamh Algar and a superb Elaine Cassidy, playing Anna’s religious but emotionally conflicted mother Rosaleen. We could have done without the gimmickry of Sebastian Lelio opening the film by showing us the set on which the interiors were filmed, and that of characters repeatedly breaking the fourth wall, but otherwise is a thought-provoking drama about faith in all its guises.
(cinema release)
