UK Edition
Review
The World to Come, review: a frontier love story that throbs with passion
This tale of two young women finding unexpected love in rural 19th-century America is a moody, beautifully shot period piece
- Dir: Mona Fastvold. 15 cert, 95 min
“It has been my experience that those who show the least do not always feel the least,” Tallie (The Crown’s Vanessa Kirby) tells her friend Abigail (Katherine Waterston) in The World to Come. It’s the entire film distilled into a single droplet of dialogue. Mona Fastvold’s breath-quickening period romance is a picture of frozen surfaces and surging depths. Adapted by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard from the latter’s 2017 short story of the same name, it’s as simultaneously chilling and warming as a slug of ice-cold vodka, and just as liable to make your mind swim and eyes prick.
Abigail is a young farmer’s wife helping her taciturn husband Dyer (Casey Affleck) eke a life from the land in the mid-19th-century American north-east (played on screen by rural Romania). The two have lost their four-year-old daughter Nellie to diphtheria, and their existence has settled into a routine that’s as numbing as the bitter early January conditions that cause frost to form in the couple’s bedroom overnight.
Abigail records this and many other observations in her diary, which provides the film with its ever-present voice-over – a device which in other hands might have felt lazy or intrusive, but here makes every scene throb with a private poetry, thanks to the extraordinary musicality of both the writing itself and Waterston’s delivery of it.
It’s in these passages that we discover the increasing strength of Abigail’s feelings for Tallie, who with her husband Finney (Christopher Abbott) has recently moved into a larger farmhouse nearby. Warm and vivacious, with tumbling, tawny hair, Tallie seems to define and fulfil a need in Abigail all at once, and they spend more and more time together, reflecting on their lives and providing one another with devotion and support – which Dyer dismissively describes as “tittering and gossiping away the hours”.
Each of their marriages lacks love, and in fact Tallie’s is abusive – albeit initially in the kind of subtle, ambiguous ways that are rarely portrayed on screen, since they don’t have the obvious showmanship of drunken rages. But love is something these two women are more than capable of giving each other, and as the seasons turn, the earth thaws, and their relationship grows ever more intimate.
The World to Come is a film about the power of female intimacy, and also men’s fear of it – the resentment and rage brought on by the realisation that even in a world where the master of the house is male by default, there can still be some rooms from which he’s excluded. Waterston and Kirby are both exceptional, expressing the strength of their characters’ bond at times with little more than a glance or a word.
And André Chemetoff’s camerawork is thrillingly attuned to both women’s interior states – his 16mm images share a scratchy wilderness beauty with Vilmos Zsigmond’s work in Altman’s McCabe and Mrs Miller, and can shift moods in seconds from the austere to the goosebumpily personal.
“Imagine faring forth into a wilderness, hoping to build the foundations of a home,” Abigail says to Tallie one day, marvelling at her ancestors’ resilience. Yet love has also brought these two women onto uncharted terrain. Theirs is a frontier story too.
In cinemas on Friday