The Wonder: Mesmerising Florence Pugh performance leads Netflix's brilliant period drama

In a pivotal scene from Sebastian Lelio’s The Wonder (released on Netflix on November 16), English nurse Elizabeth “Lib” Wright (played by superstar Florence Pugh ) is sitting before an all-male council circa 1862. The task before them is to investigate the mysterious case of a young Irish girl who claims to not have eaten for several months; Lib is skeptical but for the moment, she keeps her reservations to herself. Lib and a nun have to keep 8-hour watches alternately, in order to investigate the claim. But, and here’s the kicker, as the grim, forbidding Father Thaddeus (Ciaran Hinds) insists, “There is to be no conferring between the two of you”. The Wonder is based on the eponymous 2016 novel by Emma Donoghue, who also wrote the screenplay. And this is a recurring theme in her works; women finding friendship (or love) and meaningful, all-too-human connections despite the best efforts of controlling men like Father Thaddeus. Here, too, we see Lib and Anna O’Donnell (the fasting young girl being investigated) striking an unlikely rapport, despite her family and indeed the entire Irish village’s (very understandable) antagonism towards this English nurse. As Lib digs deeper into this slow-burning mystery, she uncovers a web of lies and oppression, of organised religion and a small, tightly-knit community coming together to impose their worldview — as well as a distinctive brand of puritan cruelty — upon the beleaguered O’Donnell family. The Wonder is a marvellous, constantly surprising film from the director who gave us the magnificent Gloria. From the moment we first see the windswept landscapes of the Irish village in question, we know that this is a place with carefully preserved secrets; Lelio creates this atmosphere effortlessly, with top-notch cinematography and sound design leading the way. From that moment on, the film juggles several complex and tough-to-pin-down themes and does so with aplomb. We learn that Lib is addicted to laudanum (circa the 1860s-1890s this is not unusual; see the Sherlock Holmes stories for example), on account of having lost a child many years ago. William Byrne ( Tom Burke ), the young journalist following the case, strikes an uneasy bond with Lib; he is an Irishman who has lost family and friends to the notorious Potato Famine of the 1840s, which was worsened by the actions of the British government. Naturally, he holds a well-earned grudge against the British. So much so that the novel begins with Donoghue’s dedication to her daughter Una (“an old Irish blessing”), which reads, “May there be no frost on your potatoes, nor worms in your cabbage”) And then there’s Anna herself, a young girl with religious beliefs so fierce and strong that she will not be swayed by Lib’s rationalism; Anna truly believes she is surviving thanks to divine ‘manna’ (the Biblical food provided by God to the Israelites during their travels through the desert). All of these disparate strands are treated with the utmost care and affection by Lelio, whose camera always pays close attention to Pugh’s small but subtle shifts in expression. This is by far Pugh’s finest performance in a relatively short career. When you look at this film or her breakthrough role as Lady Macbeth, you realise how criminally underused she is in stuff like Black Widow (and how she extracts moments of wonder and humour even in the most staid Marvel script). The rest of the cast also does an admirable job. Toby Jones in particular is excellent as Dr McBriarty, who fancies a scientific explanation for Anna’s ordeal (some of his most enthusiastic theories include “molecules of scent” and “magnetic forces”). The Wonder’s screenplay — always compassionate and forever attentive to detail — has been written by the Irish-Canadian novelist and literary historian Emma Donoghue, who based it on her own 2016 novel of the same name. Donoghue had previously written the screenplay for the Lenny Abrahamson film Room, which was also based on one of her novels (which was nominated for the Booker Prize). Brie Larson, in an Oscar-winning role, played a young woman who has been in captivity for seven years; her five-year-old son was born in captivity and knows nothing of the outside world. Before Room and The Wonder, Donoghue had previously written the screenplay for ‘Pluck’ (2001), a short film based on one of her early short stories. History and historiography in Emma Donoghue’s works In Donoghue’s novels (as well as a few nonfiction books), the history of gender-based oppression, queerness and women’s overlooked contributions to science and culture are big themes. Incarceration and women “hidden away” are preoccupations as well; look at Room, for example. In The Wonder, too, Donoghue invokes the memory of Bertha Mason, the “mad woman in the attic” in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. This is the scene where Lib meets Anna O’Donnell’s parents for the first time and is talking to her mother Rosaleen (Elaine Cassidy). “Something fatal, then, Lib deduced. But slow enough that it hadn’t killed the child yet. Consumption, most likely, in this wet climate. ‘She’s not exactly ill. Your only duty will be to watch her.’ A curious verb. That awful nurse in Jane Eyre, charged with keeping the lunatic hidden away in the attic. ‘I’ve been brought here to… stand guard?’ ‘No, no, simply to observe.’” Lib begins her ‘watch’ on a circumspect note but soon, looking at the way the child and her parents’ piety were being exploited by the Church, she begins to express her anger and disappointment; just about everybody involved seems to care more for ‘the miracle’ than the child who’s the source of said miracle. Lib realises that they’d rather Anna dies a martyr than lives a regular, eating, thriving child. Sample this scene from the novel, where Lib snaps at Anna’s mother Rosaleen because the self-righteousness in the name of religion was getting too much for the former to handle. “‘Rich, poor, we’re all alike in the eyes of God.’ It was the pious tone that pushed Lib over the edge. ‘These people are gawkers. So keen to see your daughter apparently subsist without food, they’re willing to pay for the privilege!’ Anna was twirling her thaumatrope now; it caught the light. Mrs. O’Donnell chewed her lip. ‘If the sight moves them to almsgiving, what’s wrong with that?’ The child went up to her mother just then and handed over her gifts. To distract the two women from their quarrel? Lib wondered.” A ’history’ written about a child like Anna O’Donnell might lay it on thick with the Christian themes, the sainthood/martyrdom. Indeed, the character of Anna is based on a spate of ‘fasting women’ in Victorian times. But a historiography will tell you that the Church (in Ireland, the Protestant Church) also exploited these women in order to sell the ‘miracle’ these women claimed to experience. And Emma Donoghue’s novels and stories are deeply invested in the historiography of things, not just the history. Her work on folktales and fairytales, for example, critically analyses these texts and locates patterns of ‘suppressed’ or ‘erased’ themes that only survive as allusions or puns or other artful ways in which queer themes were ‘encoded’ in medieval times. The introduction to her nonfiction book Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature begins by describing her childhood affinity for both folktales—and the critical/structural analysis of these folktales. “When I was a small child I read fairy tales. I carried straining plastic bags of them home from the library every Saturday: Grimm, Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, Arabian Nights, Br’er Rabbit, Celtic myths, Polish folktales, Italian ones, Japanese, Greek…Soon I started spotting repetitions. It thrilled me to detect the same basic shape (for instance, the motif of the selkie, or wife from the sea) under many different, exotic costumes. When I announced my discovery to my father, he broke it to me gently that others had got there first: a Russian called Vladimir Propp, and before him a Finn called Antti Aarne, who published his system of classifying folk motifs back in 1910. Ah well. This disappointment taught me, even more than the fairy tales had, that there is nothing new under the sun.” You can see echoes of this ‘nothing new under the sun’ idea in The Wonder, too, especially since the whole story is pointedly structured like a folktale or a fairy tale. There’s the ‘miraculous’ or supernatural character of Anna, there’s Lib the rationalist/skeptic, there’s Dr McBriarty who represents modernity while the O’Donnells represent the ‘old world’. Basically, there’s an entire roster of ‘stock characters’ from folktales on display here, and Donoghue’s razor-sharp screenplay does a great job of deconstructing and subsequently investigating the core beliefs of each of these characters. The Wonder comes at the fag end of what has been a great year for cinema, and it’s one of the finest films of the year for me. Both Florence Pugh and Donoghue herself underscore their worth in Hollywood, and I dearly hope that the two of them collaborate again, when Donoghue’s next novel is, inevitably, adapted. The Wonder is streaming on Netflix

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram .