The World to Come
You can see why two of the top up-and-coming actresses of the moment — Katherine Waterston (Fantastic Beasts, Logan Lucky) and Vanessa Kirby (The Crown, Pieces of a Woman) — would want to take on the lead roles in The World to Come. The film imagines two pioneer women with emotional wounds finding solace in one another — an unusual and alluring premise.
And both actresses deliver strong, nuanced portrayals. Waterston is all pent-up sorrow and unfocused longing as the introverted Abigail, who has just survived a tragedy with her stoical but devoted husband Dyer (Casey Affleck). Kirby is a seductive life force as Abigail’s neighbor Tallie, who’s married to Finney (Christopher Abbott, It Comes At Night). Finney is possessive and hot-tempered, a caustic soul that the typically likable Abbott plays well.
The two couples live in inexplicably large pioneer cabins, farming untamed western New York State in the mid 1800s, although how exactly they make ends meet with their minuscule holdings of land and livestock isn’t really clear. (The part of the American frontier is played by Romania.) The rest of the community is glimpsed briefly, but since Abigail has sworn off church and she neither receives visitors nor calls on anyone save Tallie, the movie fails to build any sense of a social fabric. The women’s love affair seems to take place in a dream state rather than within a historical framework.
The screenplay, by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard, relies so heavily on Abigail’s journal entries that you may come to dread the appearance on screen of yet another date (in lovely calligraphy), as the device becomes monotonous. The writers also construct dialogue in the “we think this is how people spoke in olden times” style, a gimmick executed with neither great credibility nor consistency. The film is further undermined by its withholding of the details of the women’s physical relationship until the final minutes.
This is just the second feature for Norwegian actress-turned-director Mona Fastvold, and she elicits fine-tuned performances from all four leads. But the cast cannot paper over the screenplay’s easy choices (you can guess the recent tragedy long before it’s revealed, ditto many plot points) and its failure to sell its own period credentials. Indeed, the filmmakers had so little story to work with that they had to throw in a long, confusingly shot storm sequence that impacts the main story line not at all.
Fans of either lead actress will want to check out The World to Come despite its flaws, as may some viewers curious to see a same-sex love story set within an little-seen part of American history. But less motivated viewers should instead check out the new French film Two of Us for the best lesbian cinema of the moment.
Grade: C. Rated R for sexual situations and mild violence. Opens February 12 at the AMC Classic River Hills; starts PPV streaming March 2.
(Photo: Bleecker Street Media)
