The Wonder – Cinema Journal

A nurse is sent to the Irish countryside to observe a Catholic girl who refuses to eat but is fine. Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio establishes a link between cinema, religion and love. Her Netflix movie wonderment is about the power of faith.

wonderment starts out surprisingly modern for an adaptation of a novel set in the 19th century. Emma Donoghue’s gothic horror story of the same name is set in the Irish Catholic countryside in the aftermath of the Great Famine. Food abounds in 1862, but the youngest daughter of the O’Donnell family does not eat. Nevertheless, nothing is wrong with her. English nurse Lib Wright was sent to Ireland to watch the girl twelve hours a day. At night, she is relieved by a nun. For hours she stares at Anna, as the girl is called, to catch her eating in secret.

“Hey. This is the beginning. The beginning of a movie called wonderment.” Sebastián Lelio’s new film (Gloria; A fantastic woman; Disobedience) does not begin in rural Ireland, but on a film set. We are in a large studio. In the middle is a house, still under construction. A voice speaks to us. “The people you’re going to meet, the characters, believe in their stories wholeheartedly.” The camera turns around and we see Florence Pugh, dressed in a period costume, eating in silence. She plays, we know, and yet something changes as the camera gets closer. It’s false, we also know it, and yet the film takes us into the 19th century. “We are nothing without stories. And that’s why we invite you to believe in this story.

wonderment is about the power of faith. A mixture of water and wheat is the body of Christ. A girl does not eat and yet does not die. Florence Pugh is Lib Wright. “I’m just here to watch,” Lib says over and over. “She’s an actress,” says a journalist (Tom Burke) about the girl. While we watch the movie, the nurse looks at the girl. And just as we begin to believe in the miracle of cinema, Lib begins to believe in the miracle of Anna O’Donnell (Kíla Lord Cassidy).

wonderment is a solid book adaptation that exudes the vibe of the novel. The atmosphere is claustrophobic, with characters locked in airtight boxes. Much of the dialogue is about the sky, and yet the characters are filmed with barely a room above their heads and with the focus on the land they’re standing on. Disturbing music mostly accompanies silent scenes. There’s something dark about the story, even before it gets really dark. Lelio takes his time to draw the spectator into his universe, to make believe what we see on the screen. Only then, slowly but confidently, does he step by step reveal the logic behind Anna’s miracle.

And yet feels wonderment a little forced. It has to do with the heaviness with which the film makes its themes known. The assured opening is a clever framing of a story about the transformative power of faith, but the voiceover overdoes it. Then there is the present Anna receives from the journalist: a coin with a bird on one side and a cage on the other, and a piece of string on each side. As you pull the strings, the piece begins to spin on its axis, making the bird appear trapped in the cage. Hold the piece still and the bird is free. Spin the coin and the bird is trapped. Is the bird free or not? “It’s up to you to decide,” says the journalist.

wonderment shows that two things can coexist. Science and religion. Fact and Fiction. Love and Evil. A story can be made up but have real consequences. Cinema is fake, Lelio shows with wondermentbut really.

wonderment viewable on Netflix.