Maybe it doesn’t matter that the Oscar-nominated Women Talking won’t win Best Picture, even though it should. Nor, perhaps, does it matter that people will say that this film, about the rape of more than 100 women and girls, sounds depressing. Because even if Sarah Polley’s superlative work doesn’t get the plaudits or the audience it deserves, it should stand to have a far greater legacy. This is the kind of cinema that endures – not just as a great work of art (although it is that), but as something that moves us all forward.
For the past few years, the women in this isolated religious community have been drugged and assaulted in their sleep, and told the culprits were ghosts. Unbearably bleak, yes, and it actually happened – Miriam Toews wrote a novel about it in 2018, on which this film is based. The men have been imprisoned in a nearby town, awaiting bail, so the women meet in a purgatory-like hayloft to talk about what to do: nothing, stay and fight, or leave. Except what they are talking about, really, is how to reset or override a world engrained with violent patriarchal structures. August (Ben Whishaw), seemingly the only man in the whole place who isn’t a vile predator, takes minutes of the meeting as the women themselves cannot read.
