Film review: Jessie Buckley gives towering performance in Women Talking

A small group of women — including Ona (Rooney Mara), Salome (Claire Foy), and Mariche (Jessie Buckley) gather in a hayloft to debate their options

Based on a true story, and adapted by Miriam Toews and Sarah Polley from Toews’s novel of the same name, Women Talking (15A) is set in a modern Mennonite colony. 

It’s a patriarchal religious community, albeit one in which no males are to be seen as the story opens — all the Elders have gone to the nearest town to post bail for the eight men who have been arrested for raping a number of the colony’s women and girls.

Seizing the opportunity to talk without restraint, a small group of women — including Ona (Rooney Mara), Salome (Claire Foy), and Mariche (Jessie Buckley) — gather in a hayloft to debate their options: Do nothing, fight for change, or leave. 

What follows is a blood-boiling account of women “who were preyed upon like animals” and a debate involving a radical reimagining of their world: should they decide to leave, they believe, they are also walking away from the promise of heaven.

Sarah Polley, who also directs, creates something of a Socratic symposium in the hayloft, with the story advancing by way of questions and answers as the characters gradually reveal themselves: The reasonable Ona, who dreams of what could be; Salome, a Fury demanding brutal justice; Mariche, the faithful Christian advising forgiveness.

By its nature didactic, the film fully delivers on the introductory intertitle that informs us that the story is “an act of the female imagination”, and not least
because of towering performances from Buckley, Mara, and Foy, but also those of Frances McDormand, Judith Ivey, and Ben Wishaw, the solitary male who humbly serves as the women’s scribe.

(cinema release)