Sarah Polley said goodbye to acting around 2010, but since then she’s carved out an incredible career as a filmmaker, writing and directing Away From Her, Take This Waltz, and Stories We Tell, and working extensively in television. Now comes her most acclaimed film yet, having already scooped up 30 awards on the festival circuit, and over 100 nominations. The based-on-true-events drama Women Talking hits cinemas on February 16.
Polley adapts the novel of the same name by Miriam Toews, who was in turn inspired by actual events that took place in a Mennonite religious community in Bolivia, when a number of women realised they have been systematically drugged and raped by the village men for years. A fictionalised response to the real-world events, Women Talking takes place after the awful discovery and imagines that while the men are away, key women in the community have gathered in a barn to discuss how they should respond: should they do nothing, stay and fight, or leave their remote, bucolic hamlet for the unknown terrors of the outside world?
Recording the minutes of the meeting is schoolteacher August (Ben Whishaw), as the women are all illiterate in according with their religious custom. But they are played by some of the best actors currently working: Claire Foy (The Crown), Frances McDormand (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), Rooney Mara (A Ghost Story), Jessie Buckley (I’m Thinking of Ending Things), and more.
So, while it may be a series of extended dialogue scenes—you have to wonder how it would play on the stage—that cast in combination with Polley’s instincts as an actors’ director guarantees you’ll be on the edge of your seat. The subject matter is unarguably dark and complex, but it’s just as unarguable that Women Talking is one of the most important and challenging films of the year.
