The Canadian writer-director Sarah Polley’s superbly inventive adaptation of Miriam Toews’s 2018 novel begins with a declaration: “What follows is an act of female imagination.” That phrase, taken directly from Toews, is pointedly double-edged, having been used by the elders of a remote religious colony to explain away years of drugged sexual assaults – attacks attributed to ghosts, demons, or hysteria (“wild female imagination”) that have left women and girls terrorised, pregnant or dead. When the assailants are finally caught and taken into custody “for their own protection”, the women have a brief window in which to imagine their future. Should they stay within the community that has raped and abused them, or leave, thereby casting themselves out of the Garden of Eden, estranged from the God in whom they still place their faith?
The ensuing Socratic debate resembles a cross between Arthur Miller’s 1953 stage play The Crucible and Dutch film-maker Marleen Gorris’s electrifying 1982 feminist psychodrama A Question of Silence, played out within the makeshift courtroom of a hayloft. “How will we be forgiven, if not by the elders whom we have disobeyed?” demands Mariche (Jessie Buckley), facing the prospect that “we will be forced to leave the colony if we don’t forgive the men”. “Is forgiveness that is forced upon us true forgiveness?” counters the strangely serene Ona (Rooney Mara), to which Judith Ivey’s Agata adds: “Perhaps forgiveness can, in some instances, be confused with permission.”
