The Thaumatrope is a persistent presence in Sebastián Lelio’s unsettling The Wonder. The film begins in a studio with a voiceover telling us, “This is the beginning. The beginning of a film called The Wonder. The people you are about to meet, the characters, believe in their stories with complete devotion. We are nothing without stories and so we invite you to believe in this one.”
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The Wonder
By now, the camera has moved into a ship bound for Ireland and focuses on an English nurse, Lib Wright (Florence Pugh). It is 1862 and Ireland is reeling under the long shadow cast by the Great Famine. Lib has been asked to observe a girl, 11-year-old Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy), who has not eaten for four months, subsisting on “manna from heaven.”
Though Lib initially thinks it is all superstition, which she intends to sweep off the table with the wand of science, the more she interacts with Anna’s family — her parents, Rosaleen (Elaine Cassidy) and Malachy (Caolán Byrne), and her elder sister, Kitty (Niamh Algar) — the more she realises that things are not so cut and dried.
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The committee of village elders who brought Lib to watch over Anna have their own agenda with the priest, Thaddeus (Ciarán Hinds), wishing for a miracle, and the doctor McBrearty (Toby Jones), hoping to stumble upon the fountain of youth.
There is also a journalist, William Byrne (Tom Burke), who has returned home to the Irish Midlands to write about the miracle even though Lib disparagingly tells him, “You’d write anything for a shilling.” Byrne gives Anna a thaumatrope with a bird on one side of the disc and a cage on the other. When spun on a thread, the pictures blend due to the persistence of vision. A thaumatrope, incidentally, is a precursor to the moving picture — how cool is that? On turning the thaumatrope, Anna asks Byrne if the bird is free or caged, in or out, underlining the motif of The Wonder — of perception and ways of seeing, of who is imprisoned and who is free.
Towering over this eye-watering beautiful film is Florence Pugh. As Lib, she brings in the tenderness and world-weariness of someone who has seen horrible things during service in Crimea and one who has suffered great loss. In Pugh’s Lib, you can see the cosmic battle between faith and science, as well as grief and love.
A slow-burn psychological thriller, The Wonder, based on Emma Donoghue’s eponymous book, is a disturbing, dream-like dissertation on faith, passion, belief, sin and redemption.
The Wonder is currently streaming on Netflix