For much of “Women Talking,” Sarah Polley’s suspenseful and galvanizing fourth feature, we are in the hayloft of a barn overlooking a remote stretch of farmland, with a lonely dirt road winding toward the horizon. The sunlight spilling in through the window seems to beckon to the eight women who have gathered here to think, rage, plan, argue and, yes, talk — about the abuses they’ve suffered and the impossible decision that awaits them. As the shadows lengthen and the conversation intensifies, the light also seems to fall gently on each speaker in turn, as though illuminating them from above or even within. Whoever might be wielding this light — be it the God they worship or the director behind the camera — these women have their full attention, and also ours.
Skillfully adapted by Polley from the 2018 novel by Miriam Toews, “Women Talking” unfolds in the aftermath of a sustained campaign of sexual violence. Over two years, several Mennonite men have raped more than a hundred women and young girls in their remote colony, drugging them with cattle tranquilizer and then assaulting them in their beds. The rapists, unidentified until recently (a male elder had attributed the attacks to evil spirits), have been jailed in a nearby town; the other men, complicit in spirit if not in deed, have gone to bail them out, leaving the women alone with just 24 hours to determine their response. Should they forgive the men, as their Christian beliefs would seem to demand? Should they respond with their own physical violence or pack their things and leave the colony?
Toews, a Canadian writer of Mennonite descent, based her story on real-life events that came to light in a Bolivian colony in 2009. Polley’s movie, though set in roughly the same time frame, consciously untethers itself from specifics. The story might as well be unfolding a hundred years earlier, or a hundred years later. The women, superbly played by English-speaking actors in plain dresses and kerchiefs, give no indication of the setting. The harsh, desaturated look of Luc Montpellier’s cinematography — not quite black-and-white, not quite sepia — establishes an ambiance of persistent, disorienting unreality. This world may be rooted in soil, in fields where children run and play and in roads traveled by horse-drawn buggy, but it also occupies a slippery zone between the concrete and the allegorical.
