Review of The Wonder, directed by Sebastián Lelio

Like so many other things in my life, I procrastinated on watching this movie for the longest time. I remember when The Wonder first came out, everyone I knew was talking about.

There were memes on people’s stories about how Florence Pugh ate, then there ended up being discussion later about it when the drama with Don’t Worry Darling ended up coming to the surface. Still, I did not end up watching the movie any time soon after the initial period in which it was released.

I don’t know how i ended up landing on it many months later, in 2023, when I was bored during work from home one day. I ended up staring at my Netflix account on the television when I was on my lunch break, and pressed play on this movie despite having no interest in actually watching it right then and there. Yet I watched it through my lunch and then ended up finishing it later in the day.

I’ve rambled enough—that’s the origin story of how I ended up watching this film. Here’s the review!

An English nurse is brought to the Irish countryside to care for a girl who hasn’t eaten in four months.

The main character in The Wonder is Florence Pugh’s Lib, who, as an English nurse, previously served in the Crimean War. She’s highly experienced at what she does as a nurse, which is why she has been the one hired and brought to rural Ireland to take care of a new patient.

Her case is Anna O’Donnell, a girl who is said to have not eaten for four months. In her time at the village, Lib is to report to the local religious leaders on the girl’s conditions, but from the beginning she has her suspicions about what’s actually going on here.

At the same time, Lib is supposed to be accompanied by a nun named Sister Michael. Sister Michael’s task is the same as hers, and she is also to report to the local religious leaders about what is happening.

But from the get-go, Lib is seen as an outsider in the community because of how she’s English, and that shows from how people will speak openly in Irish to her and just expect her to understand. She is the marked foreigner in this land, which isn’t going to be helpful later on in the film.

However, she finds solace in William, a local whose family died in the famine, he was sent away, and now he has his suspicions on Anna and her family as a journalist. There’s some steamy scenes between them throughout the film, but first William serves as a vehicle, an outside perspective, that further casts about on what’s actually going on here.

Anna’s family is deeply religious, and her brother recently died before the events of the movie. His death casts a shadow over the family, and Anna keeps claiming that she is solely kept alive through the energy given from heaven, or manna. As we soon learn to find out along Libby, her mother has been kissing her each night, and inside her mother’s mouth has been food. The claim that Anna hasn’t eaten anything in four months is completely false, as her mother has been discretely feeding her.

Lib, doing her job, tells no one to touch Anna anymore. After talking with Anna, it is realized Anna is doing her fast because of her brother that died.

He had raped her multiple times, and the religious family equated it as a problem because of Anna. It was God’s wrath because of her existence, rather than him just not being a good human being. Anna is fasting because she thinks it will set her brother’s soul free from all of his sins, and if she continues to do so, he will finally be able to go to heaven.

However, without the food, Anna continues to fall apart as her body can’t hold up anymore. In front of the town’s jury, she lies when Lib accuses the family of feeding her, humiliating Lib when it comes to her job. Sister Michael also has no idea any of this is happening, so Lib looks even more like a liar. The family refuses to feed her at this point, and Anna’s mother decides she will see both of her children in heaven.

But when Anna asks Lib and William to take her to a holy well, she collapses, and the end is in sight. William and Lib rush her back to the home, and when Anna appears to die, she doesn’t actually do so. Lib sets the family home on fire and claims Anna died in it, but in actuality, Lib and William give her a new name and take her away from the home that once kept her confined. She has metaphorically died and entered a completely new life in the process.

Overall Thoughts

This is a film that’s a bit heavy handed on the symbolism and imagery. I think one could figure out what’s going to happen in the end if they know a bit about the religion behind a lot of these decisions and what went into them, but it wasn’t slow enough that I felt like I was losing interest.

The acting in this film is quite good as well, as Florence Pugh and the girl playing Anna truly did excellent performances in both of their roles. I think that perhaps it wasn’t my cup of tea overall, but I think this is a film I could appreciate at the end of the day.

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