Sarah Polley’s sober, sombre ensemble picture stars Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley and Frances McDormand, among others, as traumatised female members of a remote, patriarchal religious colony, and it’s a heartfelt new engagement with the #MeToo debate, reminding us that the world of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale really does exist more literally than you think. The movie thinks its way intuitively into the darkest spaces of violence and survival, and attempts to give women a voice where they had none; it is, as the opening title says, “an act of female imagination”. And if the result is just a little stagey and verbose, telling rather than showing the rage and the fear, it is also a calm and focused way of addressing ethical issues.
It is based on a horrific real-life mass rape case from 2011 in a religious Mennonite community in Bolivia. Supposedly God-fearing men had over a period of four years or more been spraying farm-animal anaesthetic into the bedrooms of sleeping wives, daughters and mothers and raping them – and later blaming Satan or the women’s own imaginations. Seven perpetrators were finally arrested and convicted but the colony’s entire male population was arguably complicit in turning a blind eye. Women Talking is adapted from a novel by Miriam Toews, who herself once took an acting role in Carlos Reygadas’s movie Silent Light, set in a Mennonite community in Mexico.
