Lesbian romance is an American pioneer story with a difference
15 cert, 95 min
★★★★★
Dir: Mona Fastvold
Starring: Katherine Waterston, Vanessa Kirby, Casey Affleck, Christopher Abbott
‘IBoth actresses are excellent, conveying their characters’ bond with just a look
t has been my experience that those who show the least do not always feel the least,” says Tallie (The Crown’s Vanessa Kirby) to her friend Abigail (Katherine Waterston) in The World to Come. That’s the entirety of Mona Fastvold’s breathquickening period romance distilled into a single droplet of dialogue. 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.
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. The pair 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 weather that causes frost to form in their bedroom overnight. Abigail records this and many other observations in her diary, which provides the film with an everpresent voice-over – a device that in other hands might have felt lazy or intrusive, but here makes every scene throb with a private poetry.
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 farmhouse nearby. Warm and vivacious, with tumbling hair, Tallie seems both to define and fulfil a need in Abigail, 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 these marriages lacks love – in fact, Tallie’s is abusive – but love is something the two women are more than capable of giving each other.
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, at times expressing the strength of their characters’ bond with little more than a glance or a word. “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 on to uncharted terrain. Theirs is a frontier story, too.