Women Talking

1hr 44mins (15)

Drama about abuse in a religious community ★★★

On paper, Women Talking is a “hard sell”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. “It is women talking, and talking and talking, after enduring the most horrifying experience at the hands of men” – which doesn’t sound exactly “cinematic”, much less entertaining. But as written and directed by Sarah Polley, the film is compelling, powerful and “as tense as a thriller” – and absolutely worth 104 minutes of your time. The story, which draws on a real-life case that arose in an ultra-conservative Mennonite community in Bolivia in the 2000s, revolves around eight women (played by a “stellar cast” that includes Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley), who have two days to agree on a course of action. They have learnt that a number of men in their colony have been spraying cow tranquilliser through bedroom windows to sedate women and girls “for the purposes of sexual assault and rape”. So what should they do now, before the men return to the colony from a nearby city? Leave? Do nothing? Stay and fight? Think of it as Twelve Angry Men, but in this case it’s more Eight Angry Women. And while the film is undeniably “grim”, it is also “surprisingly funny”, and hopeful too.

There are one or two “beautifully played moments”, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. Even so, I found the film “tough going”. It was adapted from a 2018 novel by Miriam Toews, but has the stifling atmosphere of a single-setting play, and is too “static” to do justice to its “important” subject matter. With its “morose colour palette”, this film does feel rather “eat-your-vegetables”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. But if you can get past that, this is a “prison-break film” that grips “in a chewy, nuanced, contemplative way”, and it is sustained by some first-rate acting.