Women Talking movie review: Sarah Polley’s brilliant sexual abuse drama is a worthy Best Picture contender

Talk is deep in Sarah Polley’s sexual abuse drama, and actors widely regarded by the British press as national treasures (though one of them is Irish) prove crucial to the conversation.

Women Talking is in the running for a Best Picture and Best Oscar, and frankly it’s a crime that none of Claire Foy, Ben Whishaw and Jessie Buckley have wound up with Best Supporting Actor nominations. All three generate heat, while not giving a fig about being hot.

What a relief. The movie, which is produced by Brad Pitt, is set in a Mennonite community in 2010, and several reviewers have called it “talky”, which put the fear of God into me. But writer-director Polley prioritises personalities over ideas, and those personalities are so distinct and knotty that I didn’t for a moment feel restless.

Even more incredible, given the subject matter, is that so much of what this group say and do, as they gather in a hayloft, is insouciant and funny. An eye-roll from Buckley’s Mariche, an irascible mother-of-two, brought the house down. There were gasps among the audience when a young girl played a wicked prank. Turns out women taking the piss out of each other makes for a really good, if shocking, night out.

So, as in the source material - Miriam Toews’ bestselling novel which was inspired by real-life incidents in Bolivia - we discover that hundreds of women and girls were drugged and raped in their beds, over a period of years, by fellow Mennonites. Some women are pregnant as a result of the assaults. A child, the daughter of Salome (Foy), has an STD. The child is four years old.

The women know who is responsible for the crimes (a man was seen leaving one of the houses at night; he’s named his accomplices and they’ve all been jailed by local law enforcers) but the elders instinct is to protect the men and bail them out. It’s while that bail is being negotiated that a small group of the women, including Mariche and Salome, meet to discuss what they should do next. They ask sympathetic school-teacher August (Whishaw) who, unlike them, has been taught to read and write, to take notes.

There are so many sublime actors in this ensemble. Rooney Mara, as unmarried Ona, pregnant with a rapist’s child, does ingenious things with her dimples. Frances McDormand, cast against type as a woman who’ll do anything not to rock the boat, freezes your blood just by staring into space.

Not everyone in the cast is world famous but still put in extraordinary turns, such as Canadian actress Sheila McCarthy. She plays Mariche’s mother, Greta, a shy thinker who’s all parchment skin and jutting bones. Polley’s interest in older women is well-known (she gave Julie Christie the role of a lifetime in Alzheimer’s drama Away from Her). Greta is heart-stoppingly lovely, and her violation, revealed in a split-second flashback, provides one of the film’s most upsetting images. If McCarthy were to be put up for awards, it would be grounds for much jubilation.

Lovers of the novels of Marilynne Robinson or Elizabeth Strout (especially Gilead and My Name Is Lucy Barton) will swoon over the film’s pacing. Its aesthetic is just as quietly bold. It’s not quite monochrome, but all the colours, in the bright sunlight, are extremely muted. It’s only as the sun sets and oil lamps are lit that you become aware of the rich skin tones, say, of Ona and August. Which is such a neat way to suggest that the vividness of these believers is not something that can be instantly clocked.

The final scenes recall John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, while the score, from Oscar-winning Icelandic composer and cellist, Hildur Guðnadóttir raises the emotional stakes without seeming to try. It’s good to listen - and that’s what Polley’s magnificent epic allows us to do.

104mins

In cinemas from Friday February 10