(Credit: Universal Pictures)

Brilliant, multi-award-winning director Sarah Polley’s latest film is an unusually moving, character-driven drama. A feminist fable of sorts, it mixes harsh realism with allegory and gives down-to-earth dialogue a slightly fairy-tale quality. Women Talking is adapted from Miriam Toews’ acclaimed 2018 novel, which in turn was inspired by horrifying real events: a series of sexual assaults on women in an isolated, extremely traditional Mennonite community in rural Bolivia. “This story ends before you were born,” says a female voice-over in the opening shot, providing us with an initial, small mystery to start with.

The details of the attacks are gradually revealed in the film’s first act, mostly through flashbacks and guarded references by the Mennonite women themselves. Young women and girls were drugged and raped, a situation some of the community’s elders initially attributed to ghosts or demons or else divine punishment for the various women’s sins. Some of the men accused the victims of covering up adultery or lying to get attention. Others blamed it all on female hysteria. When it eventually emerged that young Mennonite men committed the rapes, the community was thrown into an uproar, and several men were arrested. Like the original novel, the film is an imagined response by the women to these attacks.

One of the film’s stars, Sheila McCarthy, speaking at a film festival screening in Windsor, Ontario, noted that scriptwriter and director Sarah Polley was the only person novelist Miriam Toews wanted for any adaptation of her work. That’s because the story would require a masterful touch to retain the novel’s power. Polley’s screen adaptation whittles down Toews’ novel to its essentials, making it truly about ‘women talking’ with few digressions. This minimal storyline calls for not only an excellent script but also the right actors to interpret it. The film’s impressive ensemble cast is up to the challenge, particularly the small group of key players around which most of the action revolves.

Rooney Mara and Claire Foy play strong, challenging characters- Ona and Salome, sisters with very different reactions to the crimes they are discussing. Veteran film stars Frances McDormand, and Sheila McCarthy show quiet strength and distinctive personalities as two older women of the community, while acclaimed stage actress and Tony Award winner Judith Ivey plays a third. Jessie Buckley takes on the role of ambivalent victim Mariche, while newcomers Kate Hallett and Liv McNeil play two adolescent friends, almost too young and lighthearted to fully absorb the situation. Each of them demonstrates unique personal responses to victimisation and trauma, from enraged to philosophical, deeply frightened to carefully indifferent, and individual judgments about the best way to react. These judgments provide the basis for the plot: the women are meeting to determine how best to respond to the attacks against them.

While the men are away, dealing with the legal ramifications, the women are told to prepare themselves to forgive and move on, according to Mennonite custom. The women gather in a hayloft to talk, trying to decide whether to meekly accept the situation, stay and fight, or leave the colony together. As the community’s practice is to provide education only to the boys, none of the women can read or write. This leads them to request the presence of one additional participant: the colony’s schoolteacher, a young man named August, who, for complicated reasons which gradually emerge, the women trust and have asked to stay and take minutes of their meeting. August is played with pathos and sensitivity by Ben Whishaw, acting as a helpful intermediary and outsider perspective during the events that follow.

With limited time to choose a course of action, the women talk, fighting their way through fear, mistrust, uncertainty, and guilt to try and reach a consensus. It’s worth noting that the director has called the story a “fable,” not to be viewed too literally. Through their dialogue, the film achieves an intriguing balance between the characters’ real selves – Mennonite housewives and girls with no education and no knowledge of the world outside their enclave – and their metaphorical selves. The latter consists of characters who are contemplating the choice to brave the unknown, risk (in their view) damnation, and take on a nearly hopeless challenge in the name of justice and the protection of the weak.

This is achieved through carefully nuanced scriptwriting, which allows the women’s discernment and speech to be ever so slightly elevated beyond what they could realistically manage. Their debate still focuses on their everyday concerns of children, farm work, and cooking. Their metaphors are still drawn from familiar sources – as with the character Greta, who repeatedly and amusingly uses the behaviour of her two cart horses to illustrate important points – but it is all elevated with very subtly grander language than these women would actually have command of, very slightly broader understanding than they would have access to. They are made part of a fable, a group of illiterate, unworldly, customarily powerless women and girls, inconspicuously elevated by their plight to characters in mythology or figures in an ethical metaphor. Within that context, the women argue, grieve, form alliances, and struggle to understand their situation and come to a decision.

In the original novel, this effect is achieved by giving August a very central role, making him the narrator of the story. There, he adds philosophical observations, comparisons to history or literature, or personal interpretations to the women’s plain-spoken discussion and periodically volunteers information they would not possess. He is clearly respectful of the women’s conference, but he is also their sole spokesman and interpreter. In Polley’s film, however, August simply takes the minutes of the meeting as requested. While August is treated with affection and joins freely in friendly chat, he is kindly but firmly enjoined not to participate in the formal discussion unless specifically invited since it is a matter for the women to decide. When his input is sought, it is information the women have decided would be useful or enlightening. This changes the dynamic completely.

Similarly, the film diverges from the novel in making the men of their colony insignificant to the main storyline. They are referenced, and their return from town looms and sets a time limit on the discussion, but they have no other impact on the women’s actions. Physically, while unavoidably present and an influence on the situation, the men are seen in flashbacks, placed in the background through cinematic techniques. They are always shown either at a distance, too far to distinguish more than their Mennonite hats and clothing, or else with their faces slightly obscured. August is the only man who is immediately present and regularly seen and heard.

Despite high emotions and the conference running into logical or ethical roadblocks as well as simple disagreements, the group of women demonstrate a strong sense of cohesion and unity. This is understandable in such an isolated community bound by a common belief and is an important part of the characters’ reality. Actress Sheila McCarthy described the efforts the film’s director took to make this unity realistic, including having the cast remain almost constantly together in the same room, even while off-camera. McCarthy interprets the film’s message as “that things happen when women can come together, communicate, and speak openly.” In this story, she finds it significant that “no one acts alone.”

What is remarkable about Polley’s handling of the characters and their situation is that it is done with unfailing respect for the women portrayed – as women, as individuals. As assault victims, yes, but more than that, as wives, mothers, and Mennonites, something that presents more of a challenge to the filmmaker. It would be easy to simply portray the colony, its men, and the Mennonite elders as the enemy and have the women choose to reject their lifelong precepts along with their attackers. Polley avoids this simple dichotomy. The women rail against their abusers and those who shield them, but they are also allowed to agonise over the demands of forgiveness and the loss of grace that may come from failing to forgive.

They not only debate but also pray together, soothe each other with hymns, and ponder the weighty questions of guilt, innocence, and salvation. This is presented not as complicity with their abusers but as keeping what is their own: their familiar faith belongs to the women as much as to the elders, it is implied. Some of the particular choices they make are not necessarily those a woman outside their colony would consider. They are influenced by the series of attacks, of course, but also by maternal feelings, by religious faith, by long experience with being subordinate, and to some extent by their very femaleness. The women feel no need to apologise for these things, and the script grants them their own perspective in a remarkably evenhanded way. It is a feminist fable not in spite of the fact that its characters are the most thoroughly un-liberated women imaginable but because of it.

The story, despite its conversational tone, is suspenseful and entertaining throughout. The film manages to draw the viewer into the potentially life-and-death importance of the decisions being made, the disagreements and differences of perspective among the women, and the difficulties and dangers involved in any possible choice the characters could make. The film finds drama and heroism in the women’s efforts and suspense in the unavoidable deadline for their final decision. There is a sober triumph in the conclusion but no sense of safety. The women will still deal with danger and uncertainty, but they, like the audience, are satisfied that their actions, and whatever results from them, have been entirely of their own choosing.