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The Wonder Provokingly Ponders on Faith, Trauma, the Stories we Believe in


The role of the spiritual in Sebastián Lelio’s films is worth examining. It was a major aspect of Disobedience, which was set in an Orthodox Jewish community, and it plays an even more fascinating role in The Wonder, a movie about a girl in post-Famine Ireland who does not eat but for supposed “manna from heaven”. Her steadfast belief in the sanctity of her fast and the divinity keeping her alive runs counter to the scientific observation of her appointed nurse from England. It is a miracle, the community determines, but do miracles happen? How long can Anna O’Donnell continue living like this?
The perplexing situation and its’ fascinating themes of faith are the products of author Emma Donoghue, who adapted her own novel with Lelio and Alice Birch -based on actual cases in the nineteenth century of so called “holy anorexia” or “fasting girls”, young girls who would go long periods without eating as a kind of religious penitence. Donoghue’s approach to the shocking practice is an intense curiosity, and the script explores seriously that question of faith and health, even as it also serves as a mystery to be resolved.
And yet it is bookended by a device that reveals the movies’ own fiction, the image of a sound-stage with semi-constructed sets as narration by one of the stars, Niamh Algar discusses the power of belief in stories and of this movies’ own role as one. Lelio is a not a deconstructive kind of stylist, so this choice sticks out as not belonging to the movies’ subject or reality except when you think about it in terms of the conversation on belief -or the stories we tell ourselves to get through hard times or experiences.
But that’s getting ahead of the point -the plot proper is told from the perspective of Elizabeth “Lib” Wright, the nurse and Crimean War veteran played by Florence Pugh who is sent to watch over the young Anna (newcomer Kíla Lord Cassidy). Dealing with both a local council and a family curious of the phenomenon but open to its’ divine implications, she is drawn to the girl and a cordial relationship forms, even as concern over her health mounts.
Despite being a woman of science , Lib is vulnerable to the kind of witching spell of the area and the people, her fascination in Anna’s condition growing even as she is reluctant to share in the supernatural insinuations of it. It’s a challenge to her, both the fact of Anna’s survival and the attempt to convince her to eat given the steadily worsening nature of her health. The conviction in Anna though remains rooted, her fast will not be broken. She is an extremely devout girl, praying several times a day -and yet expresses a few notable unconventional Catholic thoughts, such as a feeling of sympathy for those suffering in hell. She lost a brother to the famine and is convinced that is where his soul is. Her theological musings are quite as interesting as her fast that even an implicitly atheistic Lib is moved by. Yet her realm is still in the world of the tangible, the rational.
The movie isn’t quite this binary a battle between science and faith -Lelio is compelled by the characters and their relationship, as well as the other parties spellbound or confused by Anna’s condition. Tom Burke plays a journalist from the Telegraph even more suspicious than Lib, convinced the O’Donnell family is in on a hoax. Meanwhile a supposed doctor played by Toby Jones is floating theories of photosynthesis and other bizarre explanations, while the locals remain highly mistrustful of Lib and her perceived intrusion on their sequestered world. Lelio emphasizes the claustrophobia of this community and of this vocation on Lib -even in large empty buildings and miles of green hills against overcast weather. She is at all times under their pressure, while they share a pervasive sense of protectiveness over Anna, only from different attitudes and against different things. She is their phenomenon, and they prefer not to understand her.
There is an explanation for how Anna manages to get by, but it is almost shockingly mild in scope against the mystery built up over it. Divine or rational the cause of her circumstance, it doesn’t ultimately matter. Because the point turns out to not be in how she fasts, but in why. The latter why directly informs the perception of the former how in a psychologically intense kind of self-suppression of Anna’s consciousness. The moment of revelation is disquieting, harrowing as Lelio and Donoghue peal back the curtain on Anna’s life to reveal the tragic darkness at the root of her piety. It is Cassidy’s and Pugh’s finest hour.
Faith we see is this mechanism used to hide uncomfortable truth, and the manner in which it has been indoctrinated into Anna’s psyche has been the driving force of her extreme actions. Fasting is the only way she knows to assuage her spiritual crisis, a crisis exacerbated by her Catholic understanding of sin and atonement. More directly though is this reinforced by a repugnant family, governed far more sternly by the tenants of their religion and which has been a pressure point on Anna’s own mental and physical health. The movie shortly interrogates how faith can mask abuse, make excuses for it or redirect consequences, and thus sow in its’ proliferation into the next generation a denotation of fear. Anna of course can’t articulate it this way; she would never dare come close,  so consumed as she is by her blindness and denial. Lib by virtue of her time can’t even define it much either, but she knows enough the greater scars this psychology has on an already deep and abiding trauma.
The grasp of Anna’s faith is difficult to shake, but Donoghue comes up with an interesting resolution, one that for its’ narrative convenience feels absolutely appropriate, and even demonstrates an understanding of the processes of Anna’s mind and her subconscious needs. Perhaps it is also in line with the artificiality the movie is open in expressing. That framing device, the spare moments where Algar breaks character for the audience, it is to accentuate the fiction. Very much it disturbs the immersion, the belief we are experiencing in the story being told -as though Lelio is breaking us out of its’ trance in a way that runs parallel to Lib’s endeavours with Anna. The message seems to be that stories are useful and comforting, but the reality against which they are dwelt in should not be hidden -the elegant lamplit hall becomes a plywood set- a curious notion coming from storytellers. Anna never faces reality -even where she loses one ‘story’, she gains another. This device would seem to admonish her on some level for that. But then, and in spite of itself, The Wonder can’t help acknowledge the attraction of beginning faith in a new story.

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