Women Talking review – ensemble drama forefronts female experience of violence

Sarah Polley’s sober, sombre ensemble picture stars Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley and Frances McDormand, among others, as traumatised female members of a remote, patriarchal religious colony, and it’s a heartfelt new engagement with the #MeToo debate, reminding us that the world of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale really does exist more literally than you think. The movie thinks its way intuitively into the darkest spaces of violence and survival, and attempts to give women a voice where they had none; it is, as the opening title says, “an act of female imagination”. And if the result is just a little stagey and verbose, telling rather than showing the rage and the fear, it is also a calm and focused way of addressing ethical issues.

It is based on a horrific real-life mass rape case from 2011 in a religious Mennonite community in Bolivia. Supposedly God-fearing men had over a period of four years or more been spraying farm-animal anaesthetic into the bedrooms of sleeping wives, daughters and mothers and raping them – and later blaming Satan or the women’s own imaginations. Seven perpetrators were finally arrested and convicted but the colony’s entire male population was arguably complicit in turning a blind eye. Women Talking is adapted from a novel by Miriam Toews, who herself once took an acting role in Carlos Reygadas’s movie Silent Light, set in a Mennonite community in Mexico.

There were reportedly at least some men sickened enough to turn in the immediate culprits and of course nothing would have happened legally without their co-operation. But Polley’s film shrewdly – and very possibly accurately – suggests that getting them into custody was simply to protect the accused from the women’s violent reprisals.

At all events, the film imagines a situation where the women are left all alone on their farmstead to discuss what has happened while the menfolk (apparently nearly all of them) have gone to the nearest town to post bail. They decide to take a vote on three options: do nothing at all, stay and fight or flee the community. They also have to decide whether they should forgive their assailants, having been assured by their sorrowingly unrepentant elders that if they don’t, they will be excommunicated and excluded from heaven. Angry Salome (Foy) wants to fight and destroy the misogynists, but the attitude of the others, including Mariche (Buckley), Ona (Mara), Greta (Sheila McCarthy) and Agata (Judith Ivey) is more complex. They have also invited a lapsed male brother, kindly and timid August Epp (Ben Whishaw) to take “minutes” of their debate.

There are times when these characters resemble hyper-articulate campus liberals, although this idiom does create a consistent kind of fluency. In discussing the very notion of forgiveness, and emphasising that this is not always a matter of weakness or appeasement but moral rigour, the women’s discussion often sounds like a kind of Christian socialist symposium. Yet the film indirectly challenges us to consider what has happened to the real victims in the actual case. Has the conviction made the women’s lives better or made a difference since then? And come to think of it … has Harvey Weinstein’s conviction made a difference?

It’s an open question. But I can’t help thinking that in the real world, the women would have been much more aware of practicalities. Stay and “fight”? How does that work? And if they want to flee, then that might have to be more like a prison escape; they would need to leave right away, before their brutal menfolk caught them and brought them back. And they would surely have needed to think where exactly they were going and where, for example, they were going to spend the night. The film’s rather abstract conversation doesn’t convey much in the way of urgency or specificity. But there is a sustained moral seriousness in Polley’s work, a willingness to confront pain.

• Women Talking is released on 10 February in UK cinemas, and 16 February in Australia.