The Wonder

The autumnal browns and mossy greens of rural Ireland offer a brooding backdrop for Chilean director Sebastián Lelio’s first English language feature, which is set in the post-famine period of the 1860s. Against them everything about Florence Pugh’s nurse Lib Wright seems different. Not just the powder blue outfit she wears, but her northern English accent and empirical tendencies, which mark her out as the incomer she is.

Wright is no interloper, though, having been invited to this tiny village to offer her opinion on 11-year-old Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy), who has purportedly not eaten anything in months, claiming that she is living on “manna from heaven” instead. As the girl has increasingly become what passes for a tourist attraction, Wright has been hired by a panel, including the great and the good of the church (and featuring heavy hitters ​​Ciarán Hinds a Toby Jones in cameo roles), along with a nun (Josie Walker) to keep watch over the girl in 12-hour shifts in order to either prove or disprove this apparent miracle.

Given that the film is all about what we choose to believe or don’t, it’s a clever idea of Lelio’s to bookend it by showing us the soundstage on which the action takes place. He may be breaking the fourth wall completely but he’s also showing how readily we buy into the story he creates for us - a little bit of faith can go a long way. But it’s Pugh’s intensity that does most of the heavy lifting here, as tragedy in Lib’s past is slowly revealed while things also threaten to take a deadly turn in the present as she zeroes in on the truth behind the mystery. Lelio’s approach is equally fervent, using the claustrophobic interiors of Anna’s home and Lib’s boarding house to stoke the sombre mood, which is lent a further air of eeriness by Matthew Herbert’s vocal-inflected and often percussive score.

But Pugh's performance, which dovetails nicely with newcomer Cassidy’s devout determination as Anna, can’t quite overcome the uneven plotting and, at times, flimsy characterisation from Emma Donoghue, adapting from her own novel, with Alice Birch. While it's great to see Tom Burke given a less louche role than usual his reporter-cum-love-interest William Byrne is underwritten compared to Lib, which adds to the sensation of the final act of the film, though neat and tidy, arriving and unfolding with undue haste.