Film review: Jessie Buckley gives towering performance in Women Talking

A blood-boiling account of women ‘who were preyed upon like animals’

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.