movie reviews the wonder

Supported by

‘The Wonder’ Review: The Hungry Woman

In this period drama, Florence Pugh plays a British nurse hired to observe an Irish girl who’s said not to have eaten in four months.

Share full article

In a still from “The Wonder,” a man is carrying a child, at left, as a woman in a blue dress runs ahead of them at right. They are hilly terrain in Ireland.

By Manohla Dargis

From the moment that Florence Pugh appears in the period drama “The Wonder” — seated at a table on a dimly lit ship and methodically eating from a plate while she gazes into some private horizon — you are with her. Her character, Lib Wright, looks so self-contained and so manifestly uninterested in the other passengers that you can’t help but be intrigued by her. She’ll keep you watching and interested as you follow her through this perverse, provocative story about women, their appetites and a world that barbarically tries to control them both.

A story of faith and sacrifice, “The Wonder” is a mystery wrapped in a welter of complications. Set in Ireland in 1862 — roughly a decade after the end of the Great Famine that ravaged the country, leaving an estimated one million dead — the story takes off when Lib, a nurse from London, arrives for her new and uncommon duties in a remote village. For two weeks, she is to closely observe a pious 11-year-old girl who’s said not to have eaten for four months. How the child remains alive is the puzzle that Lib briskly sets about solving, fortified by her seemingly unshakable confidence in science and an attitude of clinical detachment.

Lib’s journey to Ireland is arduous — she travels by boat, train and horse-drawn cart, her head like a prow, her face a mask of stoicism — and soon proves more existentially difficult than physically challenging. At the village, she meets her employers, a dour committee of patriarchs that includes a doctor (Toby Jones) and a priest (Ciarán Hinds). Anna O’Donnell (Kíla Lord Cassidy) does not eat, will not eat, or so it appears, they tell the incredulous Lib. Whether the fast is a miracle or a hoax, Anna has become an attraction and, as far as the men are concerned, has drawn unwanted attention from gawkers and the press.

Although some on the committee seem ready to canonize the fasting girl, others are more skeptical. Whatever the truth, Anna belongs to the ranks of women and girls who are problems in need of remedying, which is why Lib and a nun (Josie Walker) are to watch her in alternating eight-hour shifts. (Why the committee hires a British nurse remains a mystery.) Lib’s no-nonsense demeanor and grim history — she was a nurse in the Crimean War, presumably alongside Florence Nightingale — make her seem perfect for the position. That Lib is another problem becomes evident later that evening when she ingests some opium.

The Chilean director Sebastián Lelio — his credits include “Gloria,” its English-language remake “ Gloria Bell ” and “A Fantastic Woman” — gracefully introduces the pieces of this peculiar tale with economy, beauty, his characteristic intimacy and usual complement of memorable faces. His only real misstep is a framing device: two quasi-Brechtian scenes on a soundstage that bookend the story and announce its artifice. “The people you are about to meet, the characters, believe in their stories with complete devotion,” an offscreen woman says, as the camera glides past film equipment and splashes of color before stopping on Lib.

The voice belongs to Kitty (Niamh Algar), who’s close to the O’Donnell family and will sometime later, when in character, look at the camera and say, “Hello again. I told you we are nothing without stories.” No kidding. It’s unclear why Lelio bothered with these forced alienation effects, which are meant to compel you to think about what you’re watching (as if you ever stop thinking) rather than identify psychologically with the characters (as if that’s all viewers do). It’s a dubious move — and the assertive modern score is already doing some of that work — and generally is as stale as one of old Hollywood’s phony happy endings.

Certainly there’s already much to consider as “The Wonder” circles around questions of control — via church, state and men — and vulnerable bodies in peril. The movie is based on the novel of the same title by Emma Donoghue, who shares credit for the script with Lelio and Alice Birch. Donoghue also wrote the screen adaptation of her novel “Room,” about a mother and her young son held prisoner in a tiny shed. Although “The Wonder” is a different kind of captivity narrative, it too turns on trauma and nurturance — the care and feeding of children — and presents maternity as both an act of independence and of salvation.

Lib assumes the mantle of motherhood gradually and with enough complexity that the story never falls into predictability. It also doesn’t confuse empathy with essentialism. Although she warms toward Anna (how could she not?) and also takes up with a journalist (Tom Burke), creating an allegorical family unit, the character remains convincingly sovereign throughout. Anchored by Lelio’s intelligent filmmaking — and by Pugh’s beautifully calibrated mix of physical vigor and temperamental astringency — Lib embodies the story’s arguments, themes and power with vivid clarity. There’s no denying her or her ravenous hunger for life.

The Wonder Rated R for extreme bodily peril and forced feeding. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. Watch on Netflix.

An earlier version of this article misstated the title of the novel Emma Donoghue wrote and adapted for screen. It is “Room,” not “The Room.”

How we handle corrections

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic of The Times since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

Even before his new film “Civil War” was released, the writer-director Alex Garland faced controversy over his vision of a divided America with Texas and California as allies.

Theda Hammel’s directorial debut, “Stress Positions,” a comedy about millennials weathering the early days of the pandemic , will ask audiences to return to a time that many people would rather forget.

“Fallout,” TV’s latest big-ticket video game adaptation, takes a satirical, self-aware approach to the End Times .

“Sasquatch Sunset” follows the creatures as they go about their lives. We had so many questions. The film’s cast and crew had answers .

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime and Hulu to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Upcoming Movies and TV shows
Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

What's the Tomatometer®?
Login/signup

Movies in theaters

Opening this week
Top box office
Coming soon to theaters
Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

Fandango at Home
Netflix streaming
Prime Video
Most popular streaming movies
What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

Civil War Link to Civil War
Monkey Man Link to Monkey Man
The First Omen Link to The First Omen

New TV Tonight

The Sympathizer: Season 1
Conan O'Brien Must Go: Season 1
Our Living World: Season 1
Under the Bridge: Season 1
The Spiderwick Chronicles: Season 1
Orlando Bloom: To the Edge: Season 1
The Circle: Season 6
Dinner with the Parents: Season 1
Jane: Season 2

The Wonder Reviews

The Wonder doesn’t instill “wonder,” nor enjoyment.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Mar 6, 2024

Much like the movie sets it depicts in its meta opening, The Wonder is similarly just an empty framework — narrative scaffolding that is never given life and a central purpose by its abridged storytelling.

Full Review | Nov 2, 2023

Based on Emma Donoghue’s eponymous book, The Wonder is a beautiful yet disturbing psychological thriller with a stellar performance by Florence Pugh.

Full Review | Oct 4, 2023

The Wonder is a mesmerising movie that finds the central character’s unshakable faith being broken and instils curious stories to be investigated.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2023

The Wonder drives its heavy themes home ever so eloquently, resulting in a worthy adaptation that won’t be easy to forget, no fewer thanks to its powerhouse cast.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 26, 2023

The Wonder is a bleak tale of an unexpected connection between two people well acquainted with hardship. Pugh’s performance, as always, elevates this to something beyond a religious period piece mystery about life itself.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

A gritty tale exploring religion vs science that is helmed by a masterful lead performance by Florence Pugh, The Wonder is definitely worth a watch and may nearly pack as much of a punch as the book.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 24, 2023

The sunless landscape that’s being blasted by wind 24×7. The creaking and dreary insides of the houses. The spine-chilling score. The constant glare of kids or elders watching our protagonist. The lack of any warmth between humans. It’s all horror 101.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 20, 2023

Pugh's performance, which dovetails nicely with newcomer Cassidy’s devout determination as Anna, can’t quite overcome the uneven plotting and, at times, flimsy characterisation.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 17, 2023

Oddly though, the contemporary framing device feels even more superfluous when it returns for the final shot.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 20, 2023

Lelio shows an exceptional management of tone and the way he captures and uses his period setting enhances the story in a number of ways. He also knows what he has in Florence Pugh whose standout performance is both thoughtful and haunting.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 7, 2023

Florence Pugh is perfect in this film by Sebastian Lelio about religious obsession and those skeptical of it.

Full Review | Jan 31, 2023

The film tacitly frames faith and science as both “stories” with sincere, devoted adherents. But it leaves no doubt as to which story we should prefer.

Full Review | Jan 27, 2023

We are left with two possibilities: The Wonder is a deeply cynical artifact, or it's entirely clueless about itself. It's hard to say which is more depressing.

Haunting and atmospheric, director Sebastián Lelio's film operates between faith and evidence.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 29, 2022

Lelio (“Disobedience,” “Gloria”) continues his reverence for strong women through Pugh’s haunting portrayal of Lib, a stoic lady who does not suffer fools.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Dec 28, 2022

Florence Pugh confronts uncertainty and skepticism in this piercing drama that questions the power of stories, faith, and freedom. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 20, 2022

... an exercise in mood with no visible threats. It will leave you with less than what you demand for a story of this nature.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 12, 2022

An adept adaptation of Room author Emma Donoghue’s novel of the same name examines how storytelling can compel, but also conflict, causing further strife amongst those who want to believe in the power of narrative as gospel.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Dec 10, 2022

The sizable wonder at the center of The Wonder is its star, Florence Pugh. Her perfectly-pitched performance holds together a film that often feels like a horror movie while flirting with questions of faith and the nature of miracles.

Full Review | Dec 9, 2022

an image, when javascript is unavailable

‘The Wonder’ Is This Year’s Other Florence Pugh Drama — The Good One

By David Fear

The very first thing you see in The Wonder, a historical drama set in 19th-century Ireland, is not the rolling green plains of the nation’s countryside. It’s not Dublin’s muddy, sooty streets, nor the dark-lit taverns where bearded men curse and drink ale or the rural family cottage wherein a miracle may or may not be taking place. We’ll get to bask in the splendor of those backdrops soon enough.

Editor’s picks

The 250 greatest guitarists of all time, the 500 greatest albums of all time, the 50 worst decisions in movie history, every awful thing trump has promised to do in a second term.

Still with us? Great, let’s go on. Wright has been summoned from London in order to observe a girl suffering from a peculiar predicament. Upon her 11th birthday, Anna O’Donnell (Kíla Lord Cassidy) stopped eating. She’s now refused food for four months, but does not seem to be ill, consisting off what she calls “manna from heaven.” Some think the girl has been touched by the hand of God, which has made her a bit of a tourist attraction and the object of fascination for a visiting journalist ( The Souvenir ‘s Tom Burke). A local committee of doctors, clergymen, and your run-of-the-mill muttonchopped authority figures have asked a nun and Nurse Wright to respectively keep watch over the child. Neither can confer with each other. They must work in separate shifts and see if there’s some sort of rational explanation or indeed a higher power at work.

Watch Florence Pugh Take Fans Behind the Scenes on 'Thunderbolts' Set

'dune: part two' is bigger, bolder — and yes, even better — than part one, watch florence pugh recount the time her mom got high with snoop dogg, o.j. simpson executor clarifies stance on goldmans receiving money from estate, supreme court justices compare bribes to taking a teacher to cheesecake factory, trump reportedly nods off while attending first day of criminal trial, drake responds to rick ross' nose-job claim, warns rapper after diss, 'don't worry we'll handle it'.

The whole notion of making up narratives to make sense of the world is what The Wonder wants us to contemplate, and that Brechtian fist-bump of it entering — and, spoiler alert, exiting — by showing us the scene behind the scenes is only the most upfront example. Every character processes their view of the events via a story; the narrator turns out to be a character, casting her eyes at us in a complicit way around the halfway point; Burke’s journalist tells stories for a living in the name of the Fourth Estate, and some of them are even true. It’s not a coincidence that, in order to try and win Anna’s favor, he shows her a thaumatrope, a coin which twirls quickly and works via images that appear to movie thanks to persistence of vision — a primitive example of a medium that will soon become the prime mode of storytelling in the 20th century.

'Rust' Armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed Sentenced to 18 Months in Prison

'Rust' Shooting
By Daniel Kreps

Is This the End of 'Bluey'?

DOG DAY AFTERNOON
By Alan Sepinwall

'Secrets of the Hells Angels' Tells Real-Life Tales of the Country's Most Notorious Motorcycle Gang

Binge Watch
By Chris Vognar

'SNL': Ryan Gosling Is Still Haunted by 'Avatar' Font in 'Papyrus 2' Sketch

'just put it in bold'

'SNL' Cold Open: Ryan Gosling, Kate McKinnon Recall Wild Alien Abduction

Close Encounter
By William Vaillancourt

Most Popular

Ryan gosling and kate mckinnon's 'close encounter' sketch sends 'snl' cold open into hysterics, keanu reeves joins 'sonic 3' as shadow, michael douglas is the latest actor to make controversial remarks about intimacy coordinators, dave chappelle reportedly says dinner with kanye west and "naked" bianca censori was "uncomfortable", you might also like, nbcuniversal’s donna langley to receive kering’s women in motion award at cannes film festival, wnba draft picks caitlin clark, angel reese and more proved they are rising stars in fashion, too, the best running water bottles according to marathoners, in ‘the line,’ austin abrams has the ‘most intense’ scene of his career — and one of the most suspenseful in recent memory, the volume hires barstool’s dane aagaard as cro.

Verify it's you

Please log in.

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy . We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

‘The Wonder’ Review: Florence Pugh Discovers a Miracle

David ehrlich.

Share on Facebook
Share to Flipboard
Share on LinkedIn
Show more sharing options
Submit to Reddit
Post to Tumblr
Print This Page
Share on WhatsApp

Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Telluride Film Festival. Netflix releases the film in select theaters on Friday, November 4 and to its streaming platform on Wednesday, November 16.

Considering that Sebastián Lelio ’s “ The Wonder ” is a religious mystery (of sorts) set in the Irish Midlands circa 1862, the first shot of the film is so wildly unexpected that audiences might fear that the projectionist has played the wrong file. We open, not on the foggy moors of a country still reeling from the Great Famine that had starved it to death some 13 years earlier, but rather in the cavernous space of a modern soundstage — the kind of facility that might house the sets for a period drama like this one. It looks more like a logo of a production company than it does the opening image of a movie. Only when a disembodied voice starts talking to us over the soundtrack are we able to make sense of what we’re watching.

“Hello,” it says with a comforting softness, “This is the beginning of a film called ‘The Wonder.’” At this point, I half-expected the film to channel Traffuat’s “Fahrenheit 451” and have the voice read out the full credits — to announce that the sumptuous but slightly undercooked tale we’re about to see has been adapted from a 2016 novel by “Room” author Emma Donoghue, and features Tom Burke playing against type as a well-meaning journalist whose delicious muttonchops threaten to swallow his entire face — but her voiceover soon proves to be less interested in details than ideas.

“We are nothing without stories,” it continues, “so we invite you to believe in this one.” Then Ari Wegner’s camera swivels around to find the actress sitting in a set made to look like the interior of a boat, and with nothing but a push-in and a splash of water through the floorboards the illusion is complete. Belief, we’re viscerally reminded, can be transformative.

It’s a gambit more compelling than much of the film that follows, but also one that enriches it; it tells you where to focus your attention when no-nonsense English nurse Lib Wright ( Florence Pugh ) arrives in Ireland to witness the miracle child Anna O’Donnell (newcomer Kíla Lord Cassidy), an 11-year-old girl in good health who supposedly hasn’t eaten anything for more than four months. Lib has been summoned to the Midlands by an impeccable phalanx of Irish and British character actors (including Ciarán Hinds and Toby Jones), who’ve hired the nurse — and a nun along with her — to watch Anna around the clock for two solid weeks, in the hopes that this tag-team of observers might determine the validity of her claim. Between a woman of medicine and a woman of faith, the local patriarchy looks forward to getting a clear answer they can immediately ignore because it came from two women.

If not for that odd framing device, you might have reason to see “The Wonder” as a story in which saints and scams are mutually exclusive, but the introduction filters the entire film through a lens that refracts it into a story that has nothing to do with God, and everything to do with belief. At no point does Lib seriously entertain the idea that Anna might actually be fed by “manna from heaven,” and at no point does Donoghue’s script — co-authored by Lelio and “Lady Macbeth” writer Alice Birch — reduce the plot to a cheap parlor game. But the fact that there’s no magic at work doesn’t necessarily mean that a miracle can’t occur.

“The Wonder” is rich with small examples that serve an even greater one. They begin with the film’s ultra-evocative look and design, which needs only a handful of (admittedly fake!) locations and a few Caravaggio-like shots of Lib skulking around the village inn to paint a vivid picture of grief and despair. Everyone we meet is attended to by one or more ghosts from the famine, and so it’s no wonder that people would be eager to believe in the rumors of a girl who doesn’t need to eat.

Matthew Herbert’s strange and ingenious score, filled with loud whacks of percussion and wisps of ascendant human voices, adds to the sense of being surrounded by lost souls; so do the white flecks that flicker like fireflies across Wegner’s Andrew Wyeth-inspired visions of the moors, the result of transmutating her digital footage onto celluloid film before scanning it for the color grade. Anything seems possible — except for when Lib is watching over Anna, and the unmistakable reality of a simple child being coerced into nonsense by her desperate mother (played by Elaine Cassidy, Kíla Lord Cassidy’s actual mother) clicks back into focus.

Steely as ever, while still allowing Lib a tragic undercurrent of her own, Pugh is excellent in her scenes with the younger Cassidy, but there’s a gear missing from the time these characters spend together. Where there should be a measure of tension between the nurse’s doubt and her subject’s unwavering belief, instead there’s only a fussy mix of secrets and pity. Even the hot and heavy relationship that Lib rushes into with Burke’s leery journalist — sad and sweet and even a little bit funny for how it betrays a mutual need for expiation — struggles to escape the shadow of the ideas that it’s meant to represent. Impressive as it is that “The Wonder” is able to squeeze so much from its spartan trappings, the film still feels clipped at 110 minutes; there may not be a lot to chew on, but there’s almost too much to savor.

It’s only in the last third of the film, once all the cards are on the table, that “The Wonder” is truly able to reach for the divine while delivering on the terms that it sets for itself at the outset. Religion may be no different than any of the other stories we tell ourselves in order to survive, but it can be uniquely indicative of their power over us. And, by extension, it can also be instructive as to the power they give us over ourselves in return.

When one of the characters in this story laments believing someone who told her that “love is forever,” there’s no mistaking how that belief was strong enough to bridge the gap between heaven and hell. “The Wonder” often skims along the surface when it should cut deeper, but the film’s obviousness only holds it back for so long. By the time it reaches its final shot — inevitably closing the clever parenthetical opened by its first — you just might believe every word of it, too.

“The Wonder” premiered at the 2022 Telluride Film Festival. Netflix will release it in theaters in November, and streaming on Netflix in December.

The Wonder review: An atmospheric tale of faith versus medicine

Florence Pugh plays a 19th-century nurse fighting Catholic mysticism with medical facts in Netflix's austere period drama.

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

"Anna O'Donnell doesn't eat." That's all a nurse named Elizabeth Wright ( Florence Pugh ) has been told — not that her medical training allows her to believe it for a moment — and why she's been summoned from London to a remote village in Ireland in Sebastián Lelio 's moody, cloistered drama (in limited release now, and on Netflix Nov. 16).

It's 1862, not far out from the Great Famine, and the sight of a British citizen in any kind of uniform is still not particularly welcome by the locals. The feeling is mutual: Elizabeth, or Lib, as she eventually allows her young patient to call her, doesn't know why she's been brought to this impoverished backwater for a case that clearly seems to be based on faith, not science, or whether it's even worth trying to assert her expertise in a place where a woman's word is hardly taken more seriously than a dog's.

But still she agrees to observe 11-year-old Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy) for two weeks without interfering, splitting shifts with a nearly silent nun brought in to share the duties (Why a nun? Lib asks; "Welcome to Ireland," comes the wry reply). And Anna seems like a sweet girl, if an unusually devout one; she survives, she promises Lib beatifically, on "manna from heaven," more soul-filling than any earthly sustenance. That's impossible, of course, though the panel of local (and naturally all-male) grandees in charge of the investigation, including an officious doctor ( Toby Jones ) and the O'Donnell's solemn parish priest (an underused Ciarán Hinds ), each have their own more or less ridiculous theories.

The longer Lib spends circling the girl's secret, the further she feels from the source, though she finds that hard to convey to the journalist at her boarding house who's also come up from London determined to ferret out the truth, a rakish disbeliever named William Byrne ( The Souvenir 's Tom Burke, whose character seems to be the only one halfway enjoying himself in this town.) To the villagers who come to pay tribute, or merely bask in the presence of a sanctified child who appears to have her own direct line to God, Anna is "a jewel, a wonder"; to William, she's a "wee faker."

For Lib, she's a puzzle to be solved and then slowly, an object of real sympathy. Maybe that has something to do with her own pain; in public, she's brusque and guarded, but alone in her room at night, the woman who has ensured her hosts that she's a childless widow enacts a strange ritual, one that involves the careful, almost sacred placement of a little pair of knitted baby booties and a spoonful of some heavy syrup (laudanum? heroin?) that makes her swoon.

There have been numerous books and think pieces about the 19th-century phenomenon of so-called "fasting girls" — mostly adolescents caught up in a religious fervor, or more likely, merely chafing at the narrow confines of their Victorian lives. Novelist Emma Donoghue ( Room ) based her 2016 novel The Wonder on one of those stories, and its subject matter seems like ripe fodder for Lelio, the Oscar-winning Chilean auteur whose gift for inhabiting the female gaze was crystallized in films like Gloria , A Fantastic Woman , and Disobedience . The sumptuous cinematography, by Ari Wegner ( The Power of the Dog , Zola ), makes the landscape look like a Brönte novel, full of windswept moors and flickering, fire-lit shadows. Pugh, too, is pretty much perfectly cast, an actress with such a keen emotional presence that she tends to cut through pretense and triviality like a hot knife.

The script, though, feels both less bold and less fully formed than its central star's performance, and Lelio chooses for reasons unknown to frame it all through a meta modern lens — bookending the movie with a self-conscious narration about "telling stories" and pulling back to reveal the studio set, with all its scaffolding and wires and backlot detritus. It's an odd choice (aren't all movies stories?) and not a particularly organic one for a filmmaker whose vision with his own material has been so distinct and intimate. Instead, Wonder 's spare, muted intrigue hangs mostly on Pugh and atmosphere, an elusive minor-key mystery. Grade: B

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

‘the wonder’ review: florence pugh dazzles in sebastian lelio’s mesmerizing study of faith and abuse.

Ciaran Hinds, Toby Jones and newcomer Kila Lord Cassidy co-star in this drama set in famine-ravaged 1862 Ireland.

By Stephen Farber

Stephen Farber

Share this article on Facebook
Share this article on Twitter
Share this article on Flipboard
Share this article on Email
Show additional share options
Share this article on Linkedin
Share this article on Pinit
Share this article on Reddit
Share this article on Tumblr
Share this article on Whatsapp
Share this article on Print
Share this article on Comment

Full credits

Thr newsletters.

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Cannes directors’ fortnight lineup unveiled, ron thompson, actor in ‘no place to be somebody’ and ‘american pop,’ dies at 83, ‘jurassic world’ eyes ‘wicked’ star jonathan bailey for lead, ‘deadpool & wolverine’ plotting (bleeped) in-theater spot asking people to silence cellphones, original ‘blair witch’ team reacts to not being involved in new movie: “it’s bittersweet”, ‘civil war’ sound editor on balancing “oppressive” battle noise with abrupt silence.

‘The Wonder’ Review: You Won’t Believe Sebastián Lelio’s Latest, but Not in a Good Way

Florence Pugh plays a widowed Nightingale nurse looking for the gimmick that could explain how an Irish girl has survived without eating for four months.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

‘Challengers’ Review: Zendaya and Company Smash the Sports-Movie Mold in Luca Guadagnino’s Tennis Scorcher 4 days ago
Digging Into the Cannes Lineup, Sight Unseen: Heavy on English Movies and Light on Women 5 days ago
Cannes Film Festival Reveals Lineup: Coppola, Cronenberg, Lanthimos, Schrader and Donald Trump Portrait ‘The Apprentice’ in Competition 5 days ago

The Lord works in mysterious ways, Christians are fond of telling us. More mysterious still is the matter of faith, a uniquely human idea which operates on the principle that phenomena we can’t explain are true, not because we understand them but because we don’t need to.

Popular on Variety

Then how to explain the film’s Brechtian framing device? Lelio opens on a soundstage, drawing our attention to the artifice: “Hello, this is a movie called ‘The Wonder,’” a woman welcomes (supporting actor Niamh Algar, so compelling in tiny doses, you wish she had more to do here). Movies aren’t real, this unusual introduction reminds, but their emotions can be. “We invite you to believe in this one,” continues the narrator, as DP Ari Wegner (“Lady Macbeth”) tracks left from a farmhouse set to the hold of a ship to find Pugh, deep in character.

It’s not clear what the film gains from this self-conscious setup, especially since Lelio proceeds to give his mostly female cast sufficient room to make their characters feel true. Once Lib arrives in Ireland, the movie commits to her reality. Just a few years earlier, the Irish Potato Famine pummeled the region, starving roughly a million, and food is still precious in most people’s minds. “The Wonder” doesn’t emphasize this overly, though you can sense it in Lib’s frustration when her employers call her away from whatever gruel was to be her first meal at the boardinghouse where she’s staying (a place with nearly a dozen hungry mouths to feed).

Lib soon learns that she’s not the only nurse they’ve engaged, though the other is no medical expert; she’s a nun. The two women are to take turns watching Anna and report on their findings. However politely serious Lelio’s approach, it’s a common enough horror-movie trope to send in an expert to examine someone exhibiting supernatural behavior, à la “The Exorcist” or “The Sixth Sense.” But “The Wonder” is not a horror movie. Nor is it the kind of film where a skeptic is swayed by what she sees (another familiar device in such films, where the director can bend the rules of nature to suit their point). When Lib first meets Anna, she’s impressed by the girl’s conviction. Believers often enjoy a serenity that atheists cannot, able to offload their anxieties to a higher power. Cassidy, who so eerily embodies Anna, taps into that peace. But the girl is not without secrets.

To make her study more scientific, Lib forbids any kind of physical contact between Anna and her parents. Almost immediately, the girl’s health starts to slump. Here, the movie seems to imply that Lib is justified in her means: She’s getting to the Truth. But it’s her rule that’s endangering Anna’s life, and the way she resolves the situation (with the help of a London journalist, played by Tom Burke) is ethically corrupt and downright inexcusable — a third party deciding what’s right for someone else’s child.

Reviewed at Netflix Roma screening room, Los Angeles, Aug. 24, 2022. In Telluride, Toronto film festivals. Running time: 108 MIN.

Production: (U.K.-Ireland) A Netflix release and presentation of a House Prods., Element Pictures production. Producers: Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Tessa Ross, Juliette Howell. Executive producers: Emma Donoghue, Len Blavatnik, Danny Cohen.
Crew: Director: Sebastián Lelio. Screenplay: Emma Donoghue, Sebastián Lelio, Alice Birch, based on the novel by Emma Donoghue. Camera: Ari Wegner. Editor: Kristina Hetherington. Music: Matthew Herbert.
With: Florence Pugh, Tom Burke, Niamh Algar, Kíla Lord Cassidy, Elaine Cassidy.

More From Our Brands

Trump and his team are already lying about what happened in court, a ‘shark tank’ star’s sky-high n.y.c. penthouse seeks $38 million, the volume hires barstool’s dane aagaard as cro, be tough on dirt but gentle on your body with the best soaps for sensitive skin, the oval, sistas and more tyler perry shows renewed as part of bet deal, verify it's you, please log in.

Screen Rant

The wonder review: florence pugh is the miracle in netflix's haunting movie.

Pugh carries The Wonder when it threatens to buckle under lofty ideas that it's reticent to explore with the fervor its subject matter would call for.

Florence Pugh has proven she can dominate the screen no matter the strength of the film behind her. Earlier this year, she starred in Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling and carried that film through sheer force of will. In The Wonder , directed by Sebastián Lelio ( Gloria Bell , A Fantastic Woman ), Pugh does something similar while having much more to work with. The Wonder may buckle under lofty ideas the film seems reticent to explore with the religious fervor its subject would call for, but it is a beautiful and haunting film thanks to the impeccable behind-the-scenes talent and Pugh's magnetism. Still, The Wonder will leave many wanting more when it comes to what lurks beneath its fascinating story.

Pugh plays Lib Wright, an English nurse called to a remote Irish village to watch over Anna O'Donnell (Kila Lord Cassidy), a young girl who has not eaten anything since her 11th birthday but is still miraculously alive. In eight-hour shifts, Lib and one other woman, a nun named Sister Michael (Josie Walker), are to watch Anna and report their findings to a local council at the end of a two-week period. Lib is naturally skeptical, searching every crook and crevice in the O’Donnell home for hidden food. The less scientifically inclined members of the village believe they are witnessing a miracle and Lib becomes hellbent on proving them wrong as journalists, believers, and non-believers descend on the village.

Related: Aftersun Review: Charlotte Wells' Debut Feature Is Poignant & Powerful

The Wonder is an eerie film, and Matthew Herbert’s score evokes an unnerving chill as Ari Wegner’s camera glides over a lush but sparse Irish landscape. Wegner (whose recent work includes The Power of the Dog , an equally haunting film ) has the camera floating in and out of village homes and over the windswept tundra, acting as a ghost itself, an unseen miracle siding with Lib and her determination to root out the O’Donnell family’s potential fraud.

The script, which is adapted by Emma Donoghue from her own 2016 novel, rightly stays with Lib's perspective as she battles a traumatic past and a village that would rather her not be there at all. The English nurse is faced with all sorts of pushback while trying to do her job, a tough prospect for anyone, let alone a woman being overseen by a council of men who do not trust her, regardless of whether they are men of faith or science. The harsh landscape only serves to compound these issues, as does the nun also sent to watch over Anna. Lib is not to confer with her to make sure their findings are unbiased, but there’s a coldness to Sister Michael and Walker's staunch performance that adds to the unsettling nature of the task at hand.

Unfortunately, The Wonder isn’t all too interested in this task, overlooking the battle between faith and fact for more interpersonal interests as well as a romantic subplot that would feel unnecessary save for its usefulness in The Wonder ’s ending. It’s an ending that feels more like a deus ex machina than an earned development, but once again, Pugh is the film’s saving grace, as is a scene of Lib confronting the council with her findings.

In the way Pugh holds the film together, so too does Leilo and Wegner’s work. The supporting cast also does tremendous work with what little they're given, including Tom Burke, Ciarán Hinds, Toby Jones, Niamh Algar, and more rounding out the ensemble. For all their work in making The Wonder an atmospheric feat about miracles and the damage they can do, though, The Wonder ’s concept ultimately goes unexplored. This could be forgiven if the subtext weren't laid bare early on with the mention of Ireland's Great Famine and the clear connection to the "fasting girls" of the Victorian era. There may be few miracles in The Wonder , but it's clear that Pugh is one unto herself.

Next: Best Movies Of 2022

The Wonder premiered on Netflix Wednesday, November 16. The film is 108 minutes long and rated R for some sexuality.

Review: If ‘The Wonder’ doesn’t quite live up its title, it remains something to behold

A young woman places two fingers on a girl's jawline in the movie "The Wonder."

Show more sharing options
Copy Link URL Copied!

Chilean director Sebastián Lelio’s solidly engrossing new film, “The Wonder,” is set in post-famine 19th century Ireland, which aligns with the trappings of its source material — “Room” author Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel. That sounds obvious, but when the movie opens, it’s not on a rain-swept countryside, but rather a brightly lighted modern soundstage with scaffolding around what looks to be a boxy house set, and a woman’s voice telling us that we’re about to watch a movie. She’s hopeful we’ll give in to the illusion, because, she says, “we are nothing without stories.”

Cinema is indeed both a challenge of belief and an opportunity to bind us to the grand narrative that is humankind. So each movie is possibly, yes, a wonder. But few draw attention to that, as if the imagined audience were culture-starved innocents or alien beings, not well-chilled Netflix subscribers.

For your safety

The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the CDC and local health officials .

Sure, the beginning is arch, and it’s twee, but it’s not some mindless gimmick. What Lelio and Donoghue (as co-adapter with Alice Birch) clearly believe is that their Brechtian device — which gives way when the camera eventually pushes into the past through the period-dressed hold of a ship — is a potent way to connect us to English nurse Lib Wright ( Florence Pugh ), traveling to Ireland and considering her own peculiar invitation to the unreal: a healthy looking 11-year-old Irish girl who claims she hasn’t eaten a scrap of food in four months, just “manna from heaven.” Lib has been hired by a committee of male elders to monitor Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy) for two weeks and offer her assessment of the girl’s veracity.

Trained on the Crimean War battlefields but not entirely powerless to her own vulnerabilities and needs, Lib views her unusual caretaking assignment — shared in shifts with a nun and unavoidably imposing on a pious, scrutinized family — as both an investigation (is she secretly eating?) and a campaign to break so severe a fast.

But the single-minded men, who include a doctor (Toby Jones), a priest (Ciarán Hinds) and a landowner (Brian F. O’Byrne), care about fact-finding less than they do proof of the miraculous in the wake of a historic famine. Hovering in the village as well is a nosy but appealingly rational big city journalist (Tom Burke), whom Lib must decide is either an ally or a hindrance in determining the authenticity of a “miracle girl,” and perhaps something more.

As a mystery exploring the limits of faith and reason in a society’s more closed-off corners, anchored by a benevolent skeptic who’d rather help one child than expose a community’s fault lines of repression, “The Wonder” undeniably resonates in these confounding times concerning belief, fact and manipulation.

Anna’s lonely, culturally reinforced holiness — sincere but worrisome — and Lib’s engagement with it reminded me of a phrase that journalist Rachel Aviv coined for her powerful recent book (“Strangers to Ourselves”) about mental health and self-narratives: what she calls the “psychic hinterlands.” It also aptly describes Ari Wegner’s moody, tactile cinematography, in which a dank house alone on a harsh plain is like a mind on the outer edges of experience, while bursts of color — damp greens, purple heather, a fire’s glow — become respites from the gloom.

And yet “The Wonder” can be bumpy, too often seeming to be about itself, not letting us inside it. Primed for theatricality by that opening, we get something very much staged instead of probed, pointed at rather than expressed. Apart from Pugh’s sturdy, intelligent portrayal of truth-seeking as a minefield, and Cassidy’s commandingly enigmatic, whispery pall, Lelio — known for his generous focus on a single main character (“A Fantastic Woman,” “Gloria”) — seems disinterested in the other actors’ roles as living, breathing parts of a community that helped create, is still shaping and might decide, a girl’s fate.

Lib, of course, has a different notion about Anna’s destiny, which is what triggers the nervous tension in the movie’s well-handled resolution of its gothic suspense and theme of moral responsibility. “The Wonder” may not ultimately describe itself, but in its admiration for the mysteries of storytelling and self-preservation — articulated at first, but shown in the contours of its ending — there is something worthwhile to behold.

‘The Wonder’

Rated: R, for some sexuality Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes Playing: Starts Nov. 2, Los Feliz Theater; Landmark Westwood; Bay Theatre, Pacific Palisades; also available on Netflix

Review: A sun-dappled Italian fable, ‘La Chimera’ feels like the discovery of a new language

March 29, 2024

An Italian director on her own wavelength didn’t seek out the limelight — it found her

Hilary Swank as Sharon in Ordinary Angels. Photo Credit: Allen Fraser

Review: In ‘Ordinary Angels,’ a real-life miracle becomes one woman’s redemption

Feb. 23, 2024

Only good movies

Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Kirsten Dunst, left, and Cailee Spaeny in 'Civil War'

What ‘Civil War’ gets right and wrong about photojournalism, according to a Pulitzer Prize winner

April 16, 2024

Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, center, sits with her attorney Jason Bowles and paralegal Carmella Sisneros during her sentencing hearing in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on Monday, April 15, 2024. Gutierrez-Reed, the armorer on the set of the Western film "Rust," was sentenced to 18 months in prison for involuntary manslaughter in the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, who was fatally shot by Alec Baldwin in 2021. (Eddie Moore/The Albuquerque Journal via AP, Pool)

Company Town

‘Rust’ armorer Hannah Gutierrez sentenced to 18 months in prison

April 15, 2024

In trying to hedge its politics, ‘Civil War’ betrays its characters — and the audience

This image released by A24 shows Kirsten Dunst in a scene from "Civil War." (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

Entertainment & Arts

‘Civil War’ unites moviegoers at box office

April 14, 2024

The Wonder Review

A plain period drama starring florence pugh..

The Wonder is now in select theaters, and will stream on Netflix on Nov. 16.

Director Sebastián Lelio has made some remarkable films, including Spanish-language drama Glora, its English-language remake Gloria Bell, and his tremendous 2018 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winner A Fantastic Woman. Each one is both grounded and imaginative, with a lived-in, familiar quality that makes up for any lack of visual embellishments. Unfortunately his latest film, The Wonder, loses its familiarity in service of a mystery presented un-mysteriously, about a 19th century English nurse who travels to Ireland to investigate a miracle, unfurling a tale of deeply held beliefs and even deeper regrets that read like demons on paper, but play out as mere inconveniences in practice.

The year is 1862. It’s been barely over a decade since the Great Famine, and battlefield nurse Lib Wright (Florence Pugh) has been summoned to a small Irish town. She’s been tasked, by the township’s elders, with watching over a young girl named Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy) who, according to some, hasn’t eaten since her 11th birthday, four whole months ago. Lib’s job is to observe and verify, though her sense of duty compels her otherwise — if only for Anna’s safety. The Wonder isn’t really concerned with the “how” of the girl’s survival as it is with the “why.”

Made from a screenplay by Emma Donoghue (which she adapted from her own novel, much as she did with the movie Room ), The Wonder is framed as a story about stories, opening on a modern day film set before stepping into the past. There’s even voiceover that makes reference to the importance of stories and the way people cling to them, setting up a tale of fanatical religious belief that manifests as overseeing a girl all but starving herself to death just years after a famine. Surely there must be reasons for this — whether good or bad ones, they’re reasons Anna and her family must believe in all the same — and in trying to discern these motives, Lib ends up exposing parts of her own past, and her own tragic story, which inform her concerns.

The problem is that these stories (and the film’s own musings about storytelling) are far more compelling in theory than in execution. While young Cassidy delivers a spellbinding performance as a girl claiming to survive off only “manna from heaven,” Pugh’s character comes off more empty than reserved, owing to a visual approach that’s far too restrained for a story of lingering doubts that conjure horrible thoughts and memories. The cast includes heavy hitters like Toby Jones and Ciaran Hinds, who play members of a board convening to debate Lib’s duties, but they’re made to feel like an afterthought. So much of the experience of The Wonder is akin to watching filmed rehearsals in pre-production, with little by way of staging, movement, or rhythm to enhance what is clearly a very loaded text, given the facts which are eventually unearthed about several central characters.

What's your favorite Florence Pugh movie?

That’s all they are, though. Just facts, despite warm, low-light photography by Ari Wegner that seeks to make the story intriguing, and creeping, jagged musical tones by Matthew Herbert, which are filled with distorted voices, and which seek to dislodge your sense of equilibrium. Rather than using staging, framing, and motion to complement these forces, Lelio decides to withhold, in favor of a more observational approach — but what he’s observing is rarely expressive enough to speak for itself.

Lib, and the movie, both meander through what should be a powerful (and powerfully self-reflexive) tale about the way sticking to stories, beliefs, and rituals can both shackle and liberate. Even the handful of moments where faith is challenged, through dialogue, result in little by way of characters or the audience feeling shaken. And when the story finally takes minor turns — calling them “twists” or even “swerves” would be generous — it’s often difficult to tell which moments are meant to be emotional highs, and which ones are the lulls or the connective tissue. After a while, it all feels flattened into a homogenous mass, seldom stirring, and almost never instilling curiosity, let alone emotional intrigue.

The Wonder is the rare film where you might get more out of reading a plot summary. It’s a rare misfire from director Sebastián Lelio, whose approach to his tale of a 19th century English nurse (Florence Pugh) investigating an Irish miracle is far too plain to be mysterious or stirring.

More Reviews by Siddhant Adlakha

Ign recommends.

Microsoft Announces Xbox Game Pass April 2024 Wave 2 Lineup

Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

UK Edition Change

UK Politics
News Videos
Paris 2024 Olympics
Rugby Union
Sport Videos
John Rentoul
Mary Dejevsky
Andrew Grice
Sean O’Grady
Photography
Theatre & Dance
Culture Videos
Food & Drink
Health & Families
Royal Family
Electric Vehicles
Car Insurance deals
Lifestyle Videos
UK Hotel Reviews
News & Advice
Simon Calder
Australia & New Zealand
South America
C. America & Caribbean
Middle East
Politics Explained
News Analysis
Today’s Edition
Home & Garden
Broadband deals
Fashion & Beauty
Travel & Outdoors
Sports & Fitness
Sustainable Living
Climate Videos
Solar Panels
Behind The Headlines
On The Ground
Decomplicated
You Ask The Questions
Binge Watch
Travel Smart
Watch on your TV
Crosswords & Puzzles
Most Commented
Newsletters
Ask Me Anything
Virtual Events
Betting Sites
Online Casinos
Wine Offers

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in Please refresh your browser to be logged in

The Wonder review: Florence Pugh is at home in this beguiling period drama – with a controversial beginning

Past the odd – and already critically divisive – opening, this period drama is a sincere exploration of faith and truth, article bookmarked.

Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey

Get our the life cinematic email for free, thanks for signing up to the the life cinematic email.

Dir: Sebastián Lelio. Starring: Florence Pugh, Tom Burke, Kíla Lord Cassidy, Elaine Cassidy, Caolán Byrne, Niamh Algar, Toby Jones, Ciarán Hinds. 15, 108 minutes.

Watching The Wonder on Netflix , you’ll think you’ve clicked on the wrong film. The beguiling period drama starring Florence Pugh opens not in Ireland’s boglands as promised by the trailer, but in the harsh light of a film studio. A disembodied voice ( Niamh Algar ’s) will reassure you that this is indeed The Wonder . The voice continues: “The people you are about to meet, the characters, believe in their stories with complete devotion. We are nothing without stories. So we invite you to believe in this one.”

It’s an odd, and already critically divisive, beginning. The film sees director Sebastián Lelio and screenwriter Alice Birch (known for her work on Succession and Normal People ) take on Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel of the same name. It should be said that nothing about Donoghue’s book particularly invites this narrative framework (the film ends back at the same sterile place) but Leilo and Birch have latched on to it, nonetheless. The reasons behind their peculiar choice reveal themselves slowly but persuasively.

The camera, eventually, closes in on a dark and dingy passenger ship, in which sits Pugh’s Lib Wright. The year is 1862. Lib is an English nurse called across the sea to Ireland, to verify a miracle. An 11-year-old girl, Anna O’Donnell (Kíla Lord Cassidy), has lived without food for four months. Lib is there only to report what she sees and hears, not to offer her diagnosis. The debate of faith versus science is to be left to the men of the village (played in part by Toby Jones , Brian F O’Byrne, and Ciarán Hinds). Has Anna been nurtured by magnetism? Photosynthesis? Molecules of scent? Or, as she claims, “manna from heaven”?

The truth of Anna’s self-sustaining starvation means little to the story. Neither is it all that hard to guess. The Wonder , instead, relies on the enigmatic discomfort of being drawn into another person’s darkest secret. As Lib becomes closer to the girl, her suspicions grow. And this is a land so scarred by famine that even the charming journalist (Tom Burke) who turns up to write about Anna, hides a mournful tether to the place. Cinematographer Ari Wegner frames Pugh like she’s a mouse crawling in the rafters, small and easily consumed by the shadows. Meanwhile, Matthew Herbert’s score, jarringly but effectively modern in tone, rumbles away beneath like a digestive system of levers and gears.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, review: Chadwick Boseman’s shadow looms large in emotional sequel
Living review: Bill Nighy delivers an almost startling transformation in this beautiful period drama
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story review – Daniel Radcliffe is pitch-perfect in an artfully absurd music ‘biopic’

The film may take a stand against religious hypocrisy – and particularly the carelessness with which lives are supplanted by agendas – but it does so without vilifying those who see faith as a tool for survival. A veteran of the Crimean War, Lib considers it a great privilege to spend time with those on their deathbeds. “They talk,” she says. “They tell their stories.”

Pugh is very much at home in this kind of role, but it’s no less arresting in its familiarity. There’s a certain steadfastness there, a sense of internal resolution, that not only allowed her to walk away from the hubbub around Don’t Worry Darling entirely untouched, but let her skip through the Marvel Cinematic Universe as its newest Black Widow without a care in the world. Lib, despite assiduously devoting herself to the factual world of medicine, has her own nightly ritual to assuage the grief of a lost child. Every evening, she pricks her finger, like manmade stigmata, and sinks into an opium-induced blackout. The Wonder ’s strange opening then begins to make sense; it is a reminder that the only truths to exist are the ones which we construct for ourselves.

‘The Wonder’ is streaming on Netflix now

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.

New to The Independent?

Or if you would prefer:

Want an ad-free experience?

Hi {{indy.fullName}}

My Independent Premium
Account details
Help centre

Our expert, award-winning staff selects the products we cover and rigorously researches and tests our top picks. If you buy through our links, we may get a commission. Reviews ethics statement

Entertainment

'The Wonder' on Netflix: That Ending Explained and Your Questions Answered

The psychological period drama starring Florence Pugh has a fairly unconventional beginning and ending.

Best New Journalist 2019 Australian IT Journalism Awards

Florence Pugh stars as Lib Wright in The Wonder.

If you just caught The Wonder on Netflix , you might have questions about that unconventional ending. The psychological drama from Chilean director Sebastián Lelio asks you to believe in the power of storytelling and how it can alter reality. Case in point: The young girl visited by Florence Pugh's Nurse Lib Wright claims to be able to survive without food, but someone might be spinning a yarn.

Let's run through the themes of The Wonder, sort the truth from the storytelling and find out why the movie opens and ends in such an odd way.

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

What's with that weird opening?

You might have been double-checking which movie you'd put on after seeing this period drama's strange beginning. To the sounds of haunting choral voices, we see the semi-built structure of an old-fashioned two-storey house. The camera pans through what appears to be a lot in a film studio, filled with equipment and other pieces of set. Then actor Niamh Algar says in voiceover: "Hello. This is the beginning. The beginning of a film called The Wonder. The people you're about to meet, the characters, believe in their stories with complete devotion. We are nothing without stories, and so we invite you to believe in this one."

The camera then stops on the interior of a ship sailing to Ireland in 1862, where the Great Famine "still casts a long shadow and the Irish hold England responsible for that devastation." It zooms in on Florence Pugh, who plays English nurse Lib Wright, the main character of the tale.

A man carrying a young girl and a woman walking through a bleak field

William (Tom Burke), Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy) and Nurse Lib Wright (Florence Pugh).

Yep, it's all a tad pretentious. But it effectively sets up the main theme of the film: the power of belief. The whole reason Nurse Wright is summoned by a self-appointed committee to a village in Ireland is that many people want to believe a young girl called Anna O'Donnell has miraculously lived without food for four months. Nurse Wright is enlisted to watch the girl for two weeks to determine how she's still alive.

This framing also sets us up to be aware of the transportive power of storytelling -- you're quickly immersed in the creaking, drippy, smokey world of the ship and Nurse Wright's journey, a journey the narrator has invited us to believe in.

What does Nurse Wright drink every night?

Nurse Wright's addiction to what looks to be laudanum, a tincture of opium, is another nod to that question of what's real and what isn't. Nurse Wright has suffered her fair share of tragedy -- her baby daughter died and her husband left her soon after -- and the night cap might be her way of coping. Pricking her finger with blood could be a way of checking she's still alive -- or it could be a form of self-harm. Amid the stresses of her current job, the ritual seems to further loosen Nurse Wright's grip on reality.

Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy) refuses to eat because of her beliefs.

Is it true that Anna doesn't need to eat?

Not long into Nurse Wright's stay with the O'Donnell family, we see young Anna's mother lean in close to her daughter's face during a nightly prayer. It isn't clear if we're witnessing a loving kiss on the forehead or something more disturbing. Nurse Wright soon escalates her watch over the miracle patient by insisting the O'Donnells no longer come into Anna's room. From this point onward, Anna's condition deteriorates rapidly.

About two-thirds through the film, after summoning the committee, Nurse Wright reveals her assessment of the situation: "Anna's mother, Mrs. O'Donnell, has been passing her food from her own mouth. She cups her face and kisses her good morning and good night, and she feeds her daughter with each kiss, like a bird." When her mother is prevented from kissing her, Anna quickly becomes ill, no longer receiving any sustenance at all.

Why does Anna refuse to eat?

Even after Nurse Wright reveals her findings to the committee, Anna's mother refuses to admit the truth. She and her husband are willing to let the experiment continue, even if Anna dies, refusing to give up their religious beliefs. In any case, Anna has "chosen" the path to death, believing that if she dies, "one soul will be released... from Hell." Anna thinks this soul will be her brother, who groomed and raped her at 9 for years. He was "punished" for the "Unholy" act with a deadly illness, but their mother says he'll be released to Heaven with Anna's sacrifice. Anna believes this is her duty because she loved her brother back.

A blond woman standing in a field in the 19th century

Kitty (Niamh Algar), Anna's sister, who also ends up being the narrator.

What's with the narrator at the end?

In the end, Nurse Wright uses the power of storytelling and belief to save Anna. After discovering the horrifying narrative Anna's mother has fed her, Nurse Wright convinces Anna she could face a different fate: That she can die and make her sacrifice, but also be reborn as a 9-year-old again who didn't suffer terrible acts. Mixing the opioid liquid with milk, Nurse Wright induces Anna into a trance-like state in which she experiences rebirth, assuming the new identity of "Nan."

Nurse Wright fakes a report of Anna dying so the committee don't press charges against her, and she burns down the O'Donnell's house so evidence of a body appears to be destroyed. Escaping Ireland, Nurse Wright, William and Nan safely make it to Sydney, posing as the Cheshire family. There, we see them share a fancy meal, with Nan shown to be eating again.

To the sound of more hopeful, ethereal tones, the camera pans and we return to the film studio. There, we see Algar dressed in all black, no longer playing Anna's older sister Kitty, but the mysterious narrator. She whispers: "In. Out. In. Out." Again, pretentious, but this goes back to the idea of believing in stories and the power of faith.

Is The Wonder based on a true story?

Irish-Canadian writer Emma Donoghue adapted The Wonder from her own 2016 novel (Donoghue did the same with her 2010 novel Room, the 2015 adaptation seeing Brie Larson win the best actress Oscar). The story of The Wonder isn't based on real-life events but was inspired by the phenomenon of "the fasting girl," dating back to the 1500s, whereby girls would starve themselves as a form of penance.

In an interview with Pan Macmillan , Donoghue explains:

"I was instantly intrigued by these cases, which seemed to echo medieval saints starving as an act of penance, and also modern anorexics, but weren't exactly the same as either. In researching the novel I looked at almost fifty of them, which ranged from Ireland and Britain, to Western Europe, to the USA and Canada, from the 1500s right through to the 1900s. That's an average of only about one a decade; these self-starving celebrities were very rare. In some cases they may have heard of each other, but the cases didn't cluster; they happened at long, random intervals, anywhere from urban Brooklyn to rural Wales."

New Movies Coming in 2023 From Marvel, Netflix, DC and More

Cast & crew
User reviews

Based on the book by the best-selling author of Wonder, this uplifting movie shows how one act of kindness can live on forever. Based on the book by the best-selling author of Wonder, this uplifting movie shows how one act of kindness can live on forever. Based on the book by the best-selling author of Wonder, this uplifting movie shows how one act of kindness can live on forever.

Marc Forster
Mark Bomback
R.J. Palacio
Gillian Anderson
Helen Mirren
Bryce Gheisar
2 User reviews
17 Critic reviews

Mlle Petitjean

Jean Paul Beaumier

Rabbi Bernstein

Milice Commander

Gendarme Marc

German Soldier 1

All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

Trivia Originally set for a release on September 16, 2022, it was pushed to October 14, 2022. Later that month, the film was quietly removed from the schedule and pushed to August 25, 2023, due to underperforming at the Fall (2021 box office and pushed again to an unspecified date due to the SAG-AFTRA strike.
Connections Follows Wonder (2017)
Soundtracks It Can't Be Wrong written by Kim Gannon, Max Steiner performed by Vera Lynn

User reviews 2

kattab-971-112343
Apr 15, 2024
How long is White Bird? Powered by Alexa
October 4, 2024 (United States)
United States
Bela golobica: Čudežna zgodba
Czech Republic
Kingdom Story Company
Lionsgate Films
See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

Runtime 2 hours
Dolby Digital

More to explore

More From Decider

'The Golden Bachelor' Stars Gerry Turner And Theresa Nist Divorcing Three...

'The View' Reacts To O.J. Simpson's Death: "The Tragedy Was The...

'The View' Forced To Evacuate Their Studio Before Wednesday's Show After...

'X-Men '97' Gives Gambit a Hero Moment You'll Never Forget

Holly Madison Says She “Tried” Exotic Dancing But Doesn’t Have...

'Captain America: The Winter Soldier' at 10: The Movie That Made (and...

Joy Behar Says She Was "Dragged Into" Controversy Over Beyoncé's 'Jolene'...

Guy Fieri Calls Drew Barrymore "Gangster" For Talking With Her "Mouth Full...

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Hijacking Of Flight 601’ On Netflix, A Scripted Retelling Of One Of The Longest Hijackings In History

Where to stream:.

The Hijacking of Flight 601

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Baby Reindeer’ On Netflix, Where A Struggling Comedian Deals With A Very Crafty Stalker

Stream it or skip it: ‘anthracite’ on netflix, about four people trying to solve a ritualistic murder in the french alps, ‘monkey man’ hits during its fight sequences, but gets muddled when it tries to explore religious extremism in india, stream it or skip it: ‘sugar’ on apple tv+, where colin farrell is an old-school private investigator looking for the granddaughter of a legendary movie producer.

Because hijacking stories involve a lot of personalities — the hijackers, the crew, the law enforcement or other person trying to foil the hijackers, etc. — shows and movies surrounding them aren’t just pure thrillers. There’s some attempt at connecting viewers to the people involved, just to raise the stakes and see if they survive the hijacking or not. A new Colombian series is a fictionalized account of a 1973 hijacking that became the longest one in mileage and time in Latin American history.

THE HJACKING OF FLIGHT 601 : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman in a flight attendant’s uniform looks at her wrist, with three dots drawn on it. She has a gun pointed at her head. It alternates with scenes of the same woman, earlier in the timeline, getting ready for work, looking at the blister developing on her heel.

The Gist: “Bogota, 1973.” Edie (Mónica Lopera) is scrambling to get out of her apartment to get to her flight; she is a flight attendant for Aerobolivar, and is due to work on flight 601 out of Bogota. Her three young sons are wreaking havoc, and the babysitter hasn’t arrived. At one point her youngest son locks himself in the bathroom, and when Edie pushes her way in, she accidentally knocks one of his permanent teeth out with the door, prompting an emergency dentist visit.

The airport is buzzing as usual; two men (Alian Devetac, Valentín Villafañe) are in the parking lot; one is holding a cake box, another is taping a gun to his thigh. They have plans for flight 601. After getting weighed by their supervisor Manchola (Marcela Benjumeca) — it is 1973, after all — Aerobolivar’s stewardesses (again, 1973) stride through the terminal, led by the beautiful Bárbara (Ángela Cano). Bárbara makes sure that a rookie stewardess, Marisol (Ilenia Antonini), is projecting the right image, and also gets the brushoff from a married pilot with whom she had a fling.

Edie tries to get Bárbara to cover for her, but Manchola is on to her, and tells her over the phone to arrive on time or lose her job. Edie tries but doesn’t make it, and Bárbara leaves the inexperienced Marisol as the only stewardess on the flight, citing that there’s only 43 passengers and she should be able to handle it. In the cockpit, Capitan Lucena (Christian Tappan) is dealing with an experienced co-pilot, Lequerica (Johan Rivera).

As Edie is dealing with being fired by Manchola, going over her head to Mustafá (Enrique Carriazo), the airline’s newly-promoted director, on whom she has dirt that will help her keep her job, the two men execute their plan. They want the plane refueled in Medellín so they can fly on to Cuba, which is a long haul for the DC-3. When a passenger needs water for his medicine, the hijackers try to get Marisol to do it, but she passes out from fear.

Captain Lucena tells Lequerica to call ground control and lie that the hijackers are requesting another flight attendant when they refuel in Medellín. Despite being fired, Edie is the only one who steps up to board that plane, in exchange for a new contract from Mustafá. When she gets to the airport in Medellín, she’s surprised to find that Bárbara is already there; she wants to help her friend on this flight — and she likes the adventure of being on a hijacked plane. Little do they know that they’ll be on that plane for days.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The most recent show that reminds us of The Hijacking Of Flight 601 is Hijack , despite the fact that Flight 601 takes place 51 years ago and Idris Elba is nowhere to be seen.

Our Take: Created by Camilo Prince and Pablo González, The Hijacking Of Flight 601 tries to thread the needle between being a serious hijacking thriller and being a campy treatise on the hijack-crazy era the early 1970s actually was. The story is based loosely on a hijacking that took place on May 30, 1973 which hopscotched around Latin America for a total of 60 hours, making it the longest in mileage and time in Latin American history.

Perhaps the nature of hijackings back then, when the perpetrators had political motivations and no intentions of hurting anyone, are what led Prince and González to give the show a more personal, soapy treatment. The story is going to be more about the crew in the air and on the ground that did what they could to keep their passengers safe, of course; these stories always are. But the first episode seems to put a real emphasis on the personal, especially when it comes to Edie and Bárbara.

They’re best friends but also opposite sides of what it meant to be a career woman in the early ’70s. Edie is constantly juggling, while it seems that Bárbara glides through her life, being completely put together and having affairs with married men. It’ll be interesting to see how each of them handle being the point people during this hijacking; they’ll likely be the ones that have the most interaction with the hijackers themselves.

What we’re wondering is how well the creators and their writers are going to be able to maintain that balance between thriller and soap. As the situation gets more dire and the crew and passengers try to figure out how to defeat the hijackers, we get the feeling the frothier parts of the story will fall away. That kind of transition can work, as long as there isn’t a jarring tonal shift.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Bárbara tells Edie that they’ll be on a beach in Havana in four hours, but the cockpit finds out that the coordinates the hijackers want to go to aren’t anywhere near Havana.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to the show’s music coordinator, because the needle drops in the first episode are all stellar, with Spanish versions of songs like “House of the Rising Sun” setting the mood.

Most Pilot-y Line: Bárbara tells Imogen to keep saying “66 times 7” in Spanish to help her smile.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Hijacking Of Flight 601 is entertaining and looks great; we just wonder if this thriller/soap hybrid is going to maintain dual tones throughout the series.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream It Or Skip It

Does 'Yellowstone' Return Tonight? 'Yellowstone' Season 5, Part 2 Premiere Date, Kevin Costner Updates, And More

Is 'Civil War' Streaming on Netflix or HBO Max?

'Dune: Part Two' Comes to Digital, But When Will 'Dune 2' Stream on Max?

Stream It Or Skip It: 'Anthracite' On Netflix, About Four People Trying To Solve A Ritualistic Murder In The French Alps

'The View' Reacts To O.J. Simpson's Death: "The Tragedy Was The Injustice"

New Movies on Streaming: 'Kung Fu Panda 4,' 'Sleeping Dogs' + More

International edition
Australia edition
Europe edition

Trance-like … William Eadie as James Gillespie in Ratcatcher.

Ratcatcher review – Lynne Ramsay’s haunting debut is a hallucinatory wonder

Ramsay’s brilliant rendering of a child’s experience during the 1975 Glasgow bin-collectors’ strike, spiked with a horrifying twist of fate, remains masterly

T wenty-five years ago, we saw one of the most impressive debut features in modern British movie history. Ratcatcher, by the 29-year-old Glasgow film-maker Lynne Ramsay , was a visually haunting, passionate piece of work to compare with Terence Davies or Ken Loach and which set a gold standard of artistry for new social realist cinema – or cinema of any sort – in the UK. I remember how blown away I was when I saw it at the Edinburgh film festival , especially by the rippling, sunlit fields at which a troubled child gazes, framed by the doorway of the half-built council house development outside Glasgow. (Only now does it occur to me to wonder if Ramsay was influenced by John Ford.)

The setting is Glasgow during the 13-week bin collectors’ strike of 1975 during which bags of rubbish piled up everywhere, causing a plague of rats in the grim estates whose families were waiting to be rehoused in new council accommodation; it was finally cleared up by sending in the army, in an uneasy echo of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. James Gillespie (played by non-professional William Eadie) is a 12-year-old from one of these families; he’s roaming around the place, squabbling with his sisters Ellen (Michelle Stewart) and Anne Marie (Lynne Ramsay Jr), hectored by his longsuffering Ma (Mandy Matthews) and scared of his hard-drinking, violent Da (Tommy Flanagan). While playing near the reeking canal, for a laugh James pushes in another boy called Ryan Quinn – who disappears under the water and doesn’t resurface. Guilty and panicked, James runs away and doesn’t tell another living soul about his guilty role in what happened, even as the hearse with the small coffin some weeks later pulls up and the open door squashes against a rubbish bag on the pavement.

What is so striking and eerie about Ratcatcher is Ramsay’s brilliant way of rendering a trance-like, epiphanic child’s-eye-view of a hundred little things that present themselves to James’s senses. But this is not simply a film-making mannerism: it is James’s own sense of dream-like unreality. He knows, or is pretty sure that he knows, he has done something terrible, but can’t be sure, but in any case the grownup world isn’t aware of it, and his life just carries on, but now with this sheen of hallucinatory strangeness. Did he dream it? Or is this the dream? At one moment, the dead boy’s mother shouts in the street: “You killed my son!”; James flinches, but she is talking about her absent husband, who left her alone and unable to keep an eye on their boy. James’s life brings him to an intimation of adulthood with a kind of poignant love-affair with a local girl, Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen), who is being abused by a gang of bigger boys.

Perhaps, as the action continues, James just forgets or can hardly believe what has happened, but it turns out that the event was secretly witnessed by another child and a nauseous twist of fate means that he can never forget; his Da has to rescue another boy from drowning in the same stretch of canal and becomes a local hero for his courage. It could also be that James senses that in some parallel world he could have died and Ryan could have survived, and the difference between these two realities is negligible. Ratcatcher is about the terrible nearness of death, like that crumbling, unsafe canal bank along which we are all condemned to walk; it is about grief and about the shock of grief and the stabbing fear which, in its terrifying way, gives you a clarified view of your own existence. A film to wonder at.

after newsletter promotion

Drama films
Lynne Ramsay
Period and historical films

Zack Snyder Explains What His 'Wonder Woman: 1854' Story Would Have Been

“It was never a screenplay, but we talked about it so much that it kind of had its own life.”

The Big Picture

Director Zack Snyder envisioned a storyline for Wonder Woman that involved traveling the world in search of Ares and finding loyal lovers and warriors on battlefields.
Snyder's darker take on the character was hinted at in Batman v Superman, exploring Wonder Woman's reluctance to help due to her history with mankind.
Although Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman 3 has been abandoned, a new series centered around Themyscira will be released by the new DCU.

Director Zack Snyder is just a week away from dropping his new film Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scavenger on Netflix. However, fans are still pondering what his DC Universe could have been if given the proper chance. Now, Snyder has revealed more details about what his initial plans for Gal Gadot ’s Wonder Woman could have in what is known as Wonder Woman 1854 .

In an exclusive interview with Empire Magazine , the Man of Steel director was answering fan questions when the topic of 1854 came up. Specifically, what it could have looked like if it did make it off the island of Themyscira. “The idea of that was an early riff we were doing: once Wonder Woman left the island in search of Ares , what happened to her in her different incarnations ?” He went on to elaborate:

“My idea for it was that she would travel around the world looking for Ares and she would go to every place where there was conflict. On those battlefields she found these lovers, warriors, and they would age out because she is immortal. They would be her lover for ten years or they might die in battle, and it was probably sad for a lot of the guys because they would see her starting to be nice to the next young soldier and be like, ‘Oh, I’m being replaced.’ But all the guys that she had with her were those loyal warriors she found on the battlefields all over the world.”

Like the story we ultimately got, it would have led her on a familiar path, “We talked about if Steve Trevor was there in Crimea.” However, this was only ever an idea, as Snyder would go on to say, “ It was never a screenplay, but we talked about it so much that it kind of had its own life .” The only physical proof left of this storyline is a picture taken by Stephen Berkman that infamously showed Wonder Woman holding the severed head of an enemy.

Wonder Woman Remains a Bright Spot of the DCEU

While Snyder’s time in the DC Universe was full of rocky terrain, with all his films being very divisive, Wonder Woman and Gadot’s portrayal of the iconic Justice League member was always a highlight . Introduced in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice , we get hints of Snyder’s darker take on the character of a hero who was reluctant to help because of her history with mankind. Similar to what Snyder was alluding to with the potential 1854 storyline. However, somewhere in that film’s production, the backstory was changed, and the picture was replaced with a World War I-era shot. This would be further explored in her own solo film where she would ultimately track down Ares in 1918 Europe. Another change was that Diana was a beacon of hope while Steve Trevor was the war-weary soldier who had to discover love again through Wonder Woman’s eyes. The darker tones still grounded the character in some much-needed realism, but by the time Wonder Woman 1984 was released, the character went in a campier direction.

While Patty Jankins ’ Wonder Woman 3 has been abandoned and Gadot’s time as the character is seemingly over, Co-Head of DC Studios James Gunn will be releasing a series centered around Themyscira, Paradise Lost . This is a part of the new DCU starting with next year’s Superman . It’s unclear if their version of Wonder Woman will appear in it or not. While waiting for more Wonder Woman news, as we continue to wonder “what if”, you can currently stream both Wonder Woman films on Max in the U.S. and check out the 1854 image below.

Wonder Woman

When a pilot crashes and tells of conflict in the outside world, Diana, an Amazonian warrior in training, leaves home to fight a war, discovering her full powers and true destiny.

Watch on Max

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, the sympathizer.

The unnamed narrator ( Hoa Xuande ) of “The Sympathizer” flees the fall of Saigon as a refugee and lands up in sunny Los Angeles in the late ‘70s. Like many immigrants in America, he suffers racist insults, works jobs he doesn’t particularly enjoy or want to do, and struggles to feel at home in a strange new land. But unlike many immigrants in America, he is hiding a bombshell secret, one that threatens his future and haunts every decision he makes. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by Viet Thanh Nguyen, “The Sympathizer,” which begins airing on HBO this week, was created for television by Don McKellar (“ The Red Violin ,” “ Blindness ”) and Park Chan-wook (“ Decision to Leave ”). Just as in the book, the series’ lead, played with dynamic intensity by Australian-Vietnamese actor Xuande, is the son of a Vietnamese mother and French father, and identified only by various epithets lobbed at him by others like bastard, two-faced, half-breed.

The narrator is in a Vietnamese communist reeducation camp when the audience first meets him. His sole task is to prepare an account of his efforts to aid the revolution. Sweat pours off his neck, off his eyelids, staining his uniform, as he sits in a wooden solitary holding cell, writing about his work as a communist embedded inside the Vietnamese Secret Police, passing on valuable information about espionage to his comrades in the Viet Cong. The narrator’s perpetually preoccupied, tinpot dictator of a boss, known only as the General ( Toan Le , born for the part), does not suspect a thing, nor does Claude ( Robert Downey Jr., unrecognizable in a curly ginger wig, complete with eyebrows, and wide blue-black contact lenses), the narrator’s CIA handler and recruiter.

The narrator has two best friends, with whom he forged a long-lasting bond at the age of 14: Bon ( Fred Nguyen Khan) is an anti-communist army paratrooper, counting the days till he, his wife, and newborn child will be able to flee Vietnam for America. The other, Man (a stellar Duy Nguyen ), is a dentist and the narrator’s VC handler. In addition to the bombs raining down around them, Man and the narrator are weighed down by the secret they conceal from their dearest friend. The VC are due in Saigon any day now, as thunderclaps of artillery remind the residents of the city. While Claude does manage to help the narrator, the General, and many of their colleagues escape, their departure from Saigon is marred by bombs falling from the sky and unimaginable heartbreak. Once in LA, the sympathizer is still required to report on the General’s activities back to the VC, which sets off a cycle of death, destruction, and lies, equally calamitous as the war they left behind.

Park Chan-wook’s direction of the first three episodes is among his finest work. It isn’t just that his fluid direction makes the episodes feel like one long, gliding film rather than episodic television. It’s that he forges an extraordinary relationship with the material that creates a luminous visual texture; the viewer can practically feel the sweat of Saigon emanating from the screen, the viscosity of rich red blood blasting out of a skull, the lissome slipperiness of pho noodles slurping into happy mouths. As in “Oldboy” and “Decision to Leave,” Park expands shots using wide angles, displaying the effect of one character on others in the background, causing the stakes to change without everyone in the frame even realizing it. His camera glides with wit and insouciance, reflecting changes in fortune and mood. Speaking of which, entire dissertations could be penned on his predilection for reflective surfaces (like Wes Anderson , perhaps his closest stylistic contemporary, Park enjoys finding new ways to use the same bag of tricks): mirrors, glass coffee tables, double-sided glass in interrogation rooms. By finding multiple ways to convey the bounty of themes at work, Park creates a kinetic storytelling energy that is rarely found in American TV. Credit also belongs to his editors Vikash Patel (“Ozark”) and Jin Lee (“Ma”), who use dissolves and match cuts in ways that are both humorous and meditative. Their collaboration with Park is poetry in motion, each cut, each move of the camera adding greater dimension and speed to the story.

Robert Downey Jr., also an executive producer of the project, mirrors the many layers at work here by stepping into multiple characters. This project is his “ Dr. Strangelove ” with the aid of wigs, facial prosthetics, varied diction, and body language that leaps off the screen with supreme confidence; the actor achieves something most artists just dream about. This writer is not permitted to share every role he inhabits, but his work as Claude alone captivates—he is both brash and a cipher, a Philip Seymour Hoffman maneuver rarely managed by other actors, especially since both the actor and Park revealed in interviews that much of RDJ’s dialogue was improvised.

But even though Downey Jr. swings it out of the park, he makes ample room for Hoa Xuande, whose work here is that of a bona fide movie star. Best known for a supporting turn on Netflix’s remake of “Cowboy Bebop,” Xuande’s work as the sympathizer encompasses a rainbow of emotions: dread, anxiety, guilt, rage, frustration, joy, and hope. His wide cheekbones and blue-green eyes dance in gorgeous disharmony, conveying the vibrant discomfort of always being caught in the middle. He is white but also Vietnamese; he is a cop but also a communist; he is charming but terrified; he exudes confidence, concealing an iceberg of terror underneath. (In an interview , Xuande’s recollection of his own biracial past as a first-generation Australian, the child of Vietnamese refugees, seems like it was more than adequate preparation for the part.) Perhaps that’s why being a spy comes fairly naturally to the sympathizer: he has never fit in, and straddling many worlds but never belonging to one, while painful and disorienting, is familiar.

What prevents this series from achieving perfection is that Park Chan-wook hands off directorial duties for the back half of the season (although it should be noted he does maintain writing credits after the initial trio). The first three episodes are likely locks for various Emmy nominations. However, as soon as Fernando Meirelles (" City of God ") and Marc Munden ("The Secret Garden") take over directorial duties, “The Sympathizer” falters. What was once enthralling becomes merely competent; most of all, the latter two directors lack Park’s audacious levity.

Nonetheless, “The Sympathizer” is a riveting watch, not just because it features front and center the experiences of Vietnamese citizens—those who fled and those who stayed behind—but because it offers a vantage point into how the American immigrant experience thoroughly bamboozles the mind; how both loss and good fortune are slippery slopes into reactionary politics; and the gruesome, eternal ripple effects of war. Grainy red text, a quote from Nguyen’s novel, appears on the screen in the first episode: “All wars are fought twice. The first time on the battlefield, the second in memory.” The audience is fortunate enough to witness both.

All episodes screened for review. Premieres on April 14th.

Nandini Balial

Nandini Balial is a film and TV critic, essayist, and interviewer.

Now playing

State of Consciousness

Simon abrams.

Space: The Longest Goodbye

Marya e. gates.

In the Land of Saints and Sinners

Brian tallerico.

Matt Zoller Seitz

The Listener

Film credits.

The Sympathizer (2024)

Hoa Xuande as Narrator

Fred Nguyen Khan as Bon

Toan Le as General

Duy Nguyen as Man

Sandra Oh as Sofia Mori

Robert Downey Jr. as Various

Director/Co-creator

Park Chan-wook
Fernando Meirelles
Marc Munden

Co-Creator/Writer

Don McKellar

Latest blog posts

Eleanor Coppola Was the Guardian Angel of Apocalypse Now

The Overlook Film Festival 2024 Highlights, Part 1: Fasterpiece Theater, Exhuma, All You Need is Death, Me

What You Do is Who You Are: Irena's Vow Screenwriter Dan Gordon on Telling the Story of a Teenager Who Saved Jews During the Holocaust

Chicago Critics Film Festival Announces Full 2024 Lineup with Sing Sing, Ghostlight, Babes, I Saw the TV Glow, More

Election 2024
Entertainment
Newsletters
Photography
Personal Finance
AP Investigations
AP Buyline Personal Finance
Press Releases
Israel-Hamas War
Russia-Ukraine War
Global elections
Asia Pacific
Latin America
Middle East
Election Results
Delegate Tracker
AP & Elections
March Madness
AP Top 25 Poll
Movie reviews
Book reviews
Personal finance
Financial Markets
Business Highlights
Financial wellness
Artificial Intelligence
Social Media

Movie Review: Should you watch ‘Sasquatch Sunset’ about a family of Bigfoots? Not yeti

This image released by Bleecker Street shows Jesse Eisenberg in a scene from the film “Sasquatch Sunset.” (Bleecker Street via AP)

This image released by Bleecker Street shows Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, and Nathan Zellner in a scene from the film “Sasquatch Sunset.” (Bleecker Street via AP)

This image released by Bleecker Street shows Jesse Eisenberg and Christophe Zajac-Denek in a scene from the film “Sasquatch Sunset.” (Bleecker Street via AP)

Jesse Eisenberg attends the premiere of “Sasquatch Sunset” at Metrograph, Monday, April 1, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

Jihae Kim attends the premiere of “Sasquatch Sunset” at Metrograph, Monday, April 1, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

The Octopus Project’s Yvonne Lambert, Josh Lambert and Toto Miranda, from left, arrive for the Texas premiere of “Sasquatch Sunset” at the Paramount Theatre during the South by Southwest Film Festival on Monday, March 11, 2024, in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Jack Plunkett/Invision/AP)

Christophe Zajac-Denek attends the premiere of “Sasquatch Sunset” at Metrograph, Monday, April 1, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

Christophe Zajac-Denek, David Zellner, Nathan Zellner and Jesse Eisenberg, from front left, arrive for the Texas premiere of “Sasquatch Sunset” at the Paramount Theatre during the South by Southwest Film Festival on Monday, March 11, 2024, in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Jack Plunkett/Invision/AP)

Emily Meade attends the premiere of “Sasquatch Sunset” at Metrograph, Monday, April 1, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

This image released by Bleecker Street shows Riley Keough in a scene from the film “Sasquatch Sunset.” (Bleecker Street via AP)

Copy Link copied

Do you reckon Sasquatches snore? C’mon, you know the answer, deep down. Of course, they do. They snore and eat noisily and pick bugs out of each other’s fur and then eat those bugs, noisily.

What else do Sasquatches do, you wonder? One of the wildest movies of the year — or the century, for that matter — suggests they mourn, cuddle, bury their dead, enjoy throwing rocks in rivers, make art and wonder if they’re alone in the world.

Even so, “Sasquatch Sunset” from filmmaking brothers David and Nathan Zellner , is a bewildering 90-minute, narrator-less and wordless experiment that’s as audacious as it is infuriating. It’s not clear if everyone was high making it or we should be while watching it.

This image released by Bleecker Street shows Jesse Eisenberg and Christophe Zajac-Denek in a scene from the film "Sasquatch Sunset." (Bleecker Street via AP)

Nathan Zellner, Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough and Christophe Zajac-Denek play a makeshift family of four Sasquatches, lost in hair suits and prosthetics and communicating only in grunts, snorts and howls. They also pee a lot.

Why the filmmakers hired such starry actors instead of paying scale to some unknowns is puzzling. None of the Sasquatches do more than what could be called Method Chimpanzee — jumping up and down, whooping and growling. A group of real chimps would ding the quartet for overacting.

As an exercise in creating empathy for monsters, “Sasquatch Sunset” does an admirable job. In the first frames, when we see a loping Bigfoot in the middle distance — and then three more — it’s clear that they are telling this story, not the folks who usually capture them in shaky camera frames.

There are plenty of Sasquatches-are-just-like-us moments, like when one brings flowers to seduce another or two Bigfoots comfort each other after a death. Perhaps the most poignant moments are when they pound trees with sticks in unison, a rhythmic question that echoes through the valley. It’s a call, waiting for a response — anyone out there like us?

But then there’s a lot of gross-out stuff. We’ve mentioned the peeing, but it turns out that Sasquatches sneeze, procreate loudly and like to touch their genitals and then smell their fingers. They can also poo on demand and throw that poo to scare off predators.

One juvenile Bigfoot makes his hand into a makeshift puppet and talks to it — like a nod to the kid in “The Shining” — and another considers inserting his manhood into a small tree hole, like a prehistoric riff off that famous scene in “American Pie.”

Both things can be true, of course: Bigfoot can be disgusting and deep at the same time. But it’s not always clear what the filmmakers are going for here — satire, metaphor, sympathy, naturalism or gross-out comedy?

This image released by Bleecker Street shows Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, and Nathan Zellner in a scene from the film "Sasquatch Sunset." (Bleecker Street via AP)

The Sasquatches reveal deeply human characteristics and may be stand-ins for our innocent pasts, a lost link in our evolution, showing the unrelenting violence of natural life or just the voiceless among us now. Or the filmmakers might just like the image of tossing poo.

Gorgeous vistas of pristine forests and misty valleys don’t help us figuring out when this all takes place but gradual clues emerge, including evidence of logging and a truly surreal bit at a human camping site, scored by the Erasure song “Love to Hate You.” But if the Zellners had an environmental lesson here, they shanked it.

There’s great music from The Octopus Project, veering from bright electric guitar noodles to sci-fi electronic dread reminiscent of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Stick through the roll of end credits and see one of the best credits ever in film: Sasquatch Wrangler. You don’t see that every day. You don’t see Sasquatch movies every day, either, but this is one you should probably let lope past you.

“Sasquatch Sunset,” a Bleecker Street release that lands in some theaters on April 12 and goes wider April 19, is rated R for “for some sexual content, full nudity and bloody images.” Running time: 89 minutes. One star out of four.

MPAA definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

Online: https://bleeckerstreetmedia.com/sasquatch-sunset

Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

Stranger Things Season 5
Deadpool and Wolverine
The Batman 2
Spider-Man 4
Yellowstone Season 6
Entertainment

The Sympathizer review: a masterful spy thriller

“HBO and Park Chan-wook's The Sympathizer is a thematically rich, stylistically refreshing miniseries that you won't ever want to look away from.”

Awe-inspiring direction throughout
An endlessly pleasing blend of comedy and drama
A densely layered story that invites multiple rewatches
A few unnecessary supporting characters

Adapting a piece of fiction like The Sympathizer , Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel, is no easy feat. The book, among the most acclaimed of the past decade, is thematically rich and formally playful. It follows its own set of rules and does so with alluring gusto. Turning it into a TV series would be one thing, but making it into a great one that actually holds on to the depth and complexity of its source material would be another, much more difficult, challenge altogether. That is, nonetheless, exactly what HBO, Oldboy director Park Chan-wook , and co-creator Don McKellar have done.

The Sympathizer , which airs on HBO and streams on Max, is one of the most dizzying TV productions of recent memory. It’s an endlessly watchable, provocative, and stylistically bold thriller that juggles so many moments of existential drama, pitch-black comedy, and good old-fashioned suspense across its seven episodes that one is frequently left with their jaw on the floor. It ranks easily right alongside FX’s Shōgun , Netflix’s Ripley , and Amazon’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith as one of the very best TV shows of the year.

Sticking as close to its source material’s plot as it can, The Sympathizer tells the twisty tale of the Captain ( Cowboy Bebop star Hoa Xuande), a North Vietnamese spy working undercover in the mid-1970s to undermine the capitalistic efforts of not only his South Vietnamese boss, known only as the General (Toan Le), but also his longtime CIA handler, Claude ( 2024 Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. ). When it looks like the North Vietnamese are finally on the verge of retaking Saigon and ending the Vietnam War, the Captain is informed by his fellow communist sympathizer and longtime friend, Man (Duy Nguyễn), that he will not be allowed to stay in his home country.

The best thrillers on Netflix right now
The 10 most popular TV shows on Netflix right now
If you have to watch one (HBO) Max movie in April 2024, stream this one

Instead, the Captain is ordered to go to America and continue reporting on the General’s actions and plans, which he does. The longer he stays in America, though, the more conflicted the Captain becomes over his continued role in a war that many believe to be over. The Sympathizer , for its part, wildly bounces around in time as it charts its protagonist’s journey from Vietnam to America and back again as he tries to convince a skeptical North Vietnamese agent that he is the loyal communist spy he claims to be. The series, like the book its based on, uses the Captain’s protracted confession in the latter period as a framing device for its entire story. That allows it a digressive kind of freedom in its telling that makes watching The Sympathizer consistently entertaining and unpredictable.

The show has a lot of information that it has to communicate at all times, and yet its purposefully convoluted plot never feels overwhelming or confusing. That is, in no small part, due to the rigorous nature of Park and McKellar’s scripts, as well as the latter’s direction of The Sympathizer ‘s stunning first three episodes (Marc Munden and City of God filmmaker Fernando Meirelles direct its other chapters). As a director, Park has always been skilled at communicating complex layers of information in a manner that is not just digestible, but invigoratingly visual. That ability is on full display in The Sympathizer , a series that uses simple visual tricks like cutaways, observational camera pans, fast-forwards, and rewinds to further engross viewers not only in the Captain’s book-length confession. but also his ever-turbulent mental state.

The Sympathizer ‘s darkly comic streak also does a lot to make the considerable load of information it carries on its back seem lighter than it is. The series, in true Park Chan-wook fashion, routinely blends moments of horror, violence, and tragedy with instances of wry, occasionally slapstick humor. In one scene, the Captain impulsively covers up the face of a man he’s about to kill with a takeout bag from a local burger place — its smiley logo staring back at him as he pulls the trigger of his gun. In subsequent episodes, the Captain sees the chain’s smirking logo on lampshades, car rims, and even the moon itself. It’s a recurring beat that offers important insight into the character’s growing guilt over his actions, but it’s also a morbidly funny visual gag that feels of a piece with the overall surreality of The Sympathizer ‘s style and story.

Thanks to its 1970s Hollywood-inspired details and overarching, wild creative spirit, The Sympathizer emerges as a TV show that looks and moves unlike any other. At times, its editing rhythms feel shockingly experimental. Donald Graham Burt and Alec Hammond’s colorful production design, meanwhile, only makes it feel all the more heightened and dreamlike, and the same goes for Downey Jr.’s contributions. The longtime Marvel star plays multiple roles in The Sympathizer and dons completely different, mostly transformative looks for each. He appears throughout the series as not just Claude, but also “Napalm” Ned, a military veteran turned politician; Professor Hammer, a racist academic who runs his college’s “Oriental Studies” program; and Niko, an egotistical filmmaker who hires the Captain to help him make an “authentic” movie about the Vietnam War.

Downey Jr.’s performances are, for the most part, glorious to witness, and his multiple roles serve a greater purpose in The Sympathizer than just letting its biggest star go crazy on-screen. They make the show’s oddball approach to its story explicit and, even more importantly, make the Captain’s struggle to hold onto his identity seem all the more slippery. After all, how is someone supposed to keep hold of themselves when not only are they playing different parts at once, but so it seems is everyone else?

The fact that The Sympathizer is able to effectively ask such questions in the cartoonish way it does is proof of just how firm of a grip it has on its story and tone at all times. As is the case with so many of the movies that Park Chan-wook has had a hand in over the years, watching it feels a bit like watching the greatest magic act you’ll ever see. It pulls off more seemingly impossible tricks than most TV shows would ever dream of attempting, and it’s got even more aces hidden up its sleeves than you’ll see coming. Sometimes, all one can do is sit back and clap.

The Sympathizer premieres Sunday, April 14 on HBO. New episodes debut weekly on Sundays. Digital Trends was given early access to all seven of the show’s installments.

Editors' Recommendations

Like the hit HBO series The Sympathizer? Then watch these 3 great shows right now
Best new movies to stream on Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, Max (HBO), and more
The best thrillers on Hulu right now
The best Amazon Prime original series right now
The best movies on Max right now
Product Reviews
Streaming Services

There are few streaming services with a deeper lineup of great movies to watch than Max. Whatever you're looking for, you're almost guaranteed to find at least a few options on the streaming service, and that's especially true for crime dramas. Every streamer has at least a few crime dramas. After all, it's been a staple of movie-making for as long as movies have been around.

Max, though, has so many that it can actually be tough to pick one if you don't already know what you're looking for, which is, of course, where we come in. We've assembled three great Max crime dramas you should watch in April of 2024: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) Trailer #1 | Movieclips Classic Trailers

If you're looking for some of the best shows on television right now, from new titles to classics, Max, formerly HBO Max, has plenty to watch. The streaming service offers lots of new content, like The Last of Us and Tokyo Vice, as well as lots of library titles from the HBO vault. There are other network sitcoms available to stream, too, some newly added to the mix.

We keep this list of the best shows on Max right now updated all the time, so you can always find the perfect match. Browse the list and you'll find something great worth checking out the next time you want to sit down and relax with a good show. Whether it's something new or episodes of an old show to watch again, you won't be disappointed with the choices.

Star Wars: The Acolyte aims to be one of the more unique additions to the Star Wars universe. This upcoming series will give audiences their first look into the world of the Jedi during the age of the High Republic. Specifically, it will follow the Jedi near the end of this era as they investigate a string of crimes that will have them uncover evil forces brewing in the shadows.

Due to the open-ended nature of this piece of Star Wars history, fans can only imagine what The Acolyte will add to the franchise. But until it premieres, here's hoping the show will feature these five things in its first season. The Jedi-Sith War

IMAGES

The Wonder Movie (2022): Cast, Actors, Producer, Director, Roles and Rating
The Wonder Review
Florence Pugh
Wonder movie shares a new beautiful trailer which will melt the hearts
Wonder Movie Review
Wonder The Movie: Plot, Cast Lists, Review, Trailer & Ending Explained

VIDEO

Wonder
Wonder

COMMENTS

The Wonder movie review & film summary (2022)
Lelio is less concerned about the practical truths and lies of "The Wonder" than he is about what they mean, what they say about humanity, and how they interrogate what we believe. Pugh plays Lib Wright, an English nurse in the year 1862, a year when the mass famine of the 1840s has left scars across the Irish landscape to which she travels.
The Wonder
Movie Info. The Irish Midlands, 1862 -- a young girl stops eating but remains miraculously alive and well. English nurse Lib Wright is brought to a tiny village to observe eleven-year old Anna O ...
'The Wonder' Review: The Hungry Woman
A story of faith and sacrifice, "The Wonder" is a mystery wrapped in a welter of complications. Set in Ireland in 1862 — roughly a decade after the end of the Great Famine that ravaged the ...
The Wonder review
The Wonder, and Pugh at its centre, pulses with ragged frustration, which slowly morphs into a more defined fury; the recently, horribly recognisable kind that comes from watching others reject ...
The Wonder (2022)
The Wonder: Directed by Sebastián Lelio. With Niamh Algar, Florence Pugh, David Wilmot, Ruth Bradley. A tale of two strangers who transform each other's lives, a psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil.
The Wonder review
The wonder reverberates with the pangs of hunger and fear. The Wonder is released on 2 November in cinemas, and on 16 November on Netflix. Explore more on these topics
The Wonder
The Wonder is a mesmerising movie that finds the central character's unshakable faith being broken and instils curious stories to be investigated. Full Review | Sep 8, 2023
'The Wonder' Is This Year's Other Florence Pugh Drama
November 15, 2022. Kíla Lord Cassidy, Tom Burke and Florence Pugh in 'The Wonder.'. AIDAN MONAGHAN/NETFLIX. The very first thing you see in The Wonder, a historical drama set in 19th-century ...
'The Wonder' Review: Florence Pugh Discovers a Miracle
Considering that Sebastián Lelio's "The Wonder" is a religious mystery (of sorts) set in the Irish Midlands circa 1862, the first shot of the film is so wildly unexpected that audiences ...
The Wonder review: An atmospheric tale of faith versus medicine
Novelist Emma Donoghue ( Room) based her 2016 novel The Wonder on one of those stories, and its subject matter seems like ripe fodder for Lelio, the Oscar-winning Chilean auteur whose gift for ...
'The Wonder' Review: Florence Pugh Dazzles in Sebastian Lelio's
Venue: Telluride Film Festival. Cast: Florence Pugh, Kila Lord Cassidy, Tom Burke, Ciaran Hinds, Toby Jones. Director: Sebastian Lelio. Screenwriters: Emma Donoghue, Alice Birch, Sebastian Lelio ...
'The Wonder' Review: You Won't Believe Sebastián Lelio's Latest
Screenplay: Emma Donoghue, Sebastián Lelio, Alice Birch, based on the novel by Emma Donoghue. Camera: Ari Wegner. Editor: Kristina Hetherington. Music: Matthew Herbert. With: Florence Pugh, Tom ...
The Wonder review
It's 1862 and we're on a boat. A decade after the great famine, English nurse Elizabeth "Lib" Wright is travelling to a village in the Irish midlands to attend local girl Anna O'Donnell ...
The Wonder (2022)
Permalink. 8/10. A slow-burn film about the power of belief. steveinadelaide 12 November 2022. THE WONDER, directed by Sebastián Leliois, is an intriguing exploration of the relationship between science and religion set in the Irish Midlands of the 1800s.
The Wonder Review: Florence Pugh Is The Miracle In Netflix's Haunting Movie
The Wonder is an eerie film, and Matthew Herbert's score evokes an unnerving chill as Ari Wegner's camera glides over a lush but sparse Irish landscape. Wegner (whose recent work includes The Power of the Dog, an equally haunting film) has the camera floating in and out of village homes and over the windswept tundra, acting as a ghost itself, an unseen miracle siding with Lib and her ...
'The Wonder' review: Florence Pugh pursues an enigma
Florence Pugh, left, and Kíla Lord Cassidy in the movie "The Wonder.". Chilean director Sebastián Lelio's solidly engrossing new film, "The Wonder," is set in post-famine 19th century ...
The Wonder Review
Verdict. The Wonder is the rare film where you might get more out of reading a plot summary. It's a rare misfire from director Sebastián Lelio, whose approach to his tale of a 19th century ...
The Wonder movie review: Florence Pugh is at home in this beguiling
The Wonder review: Florence Pugh is at home in this beguiling period drama - with a controversial beginning Past the odd - and already critically divisive - opening, this period drama is a ...
'The Wonder' Review: Florence Pugh Film Pits Science ...
This review was originally a part of our 2022 Toronto International Film Festival coverage.. The Wonder begins with an acknowledgment of the artifice inherent to what director Sebastián Lelio has ...
'The Wonder' on Netflix: That Ending Explained and Your Questions
Nov. 25, 2022 12:10 p.m. PT. 5 min read. Florence Pugh stars as Lib Wright in The Wonder. Aidan Monaghan/Netflix. If you just caught The Wonder on Netflix, you might have questions about that ...
'The Wonder' Netflix Review: Stream It or Skip It?
Florence Pugh is once again the best part of a movie in 2022, outshining her co-stars as well as the material. ... While The Wonder does get a little too focused on atmosphere and ambiguity for ...
White Bird (2023)
White Bird: Directed by Marc Forster. With Gillian Anderson, Helen Mirren, Bryce Gheisar, Olivia Ross. Based on the book by the best-selling author of Wonder, this uplifting movie shows how one act of kindness can live on forever.
'The Hijacking Of Flight 601' Netflix Review: Stream It Or Skip It?
The Gist: "Bogota, 1973.". Edie (Mónica Lopera) is scrambling to get out of her apartment to get to her flight; she is a flight attendant for Aerobolivar, and is due to work on flight 601 out ...
Ratcatcher review
T wenty-five years ago, we saw one of the most impressive debut features in modern British movie history. Ratcatcher, by the 29-year-old Glasgow film-maker Lynne Ramsay, was a visually haunting ...
Zack Snyder Finally Reveals What 'Wonder Woman 1854' Was About
Image via Warner Bros. The Big Picture. Director Zack Snyder envisioned a storyline for Wonder Woman that involved traveling the world in search of Ares and finding loyal lovers and warriors on ...
The Sympathizer movie review & film summary (2024)
The Sympathizer. Nandini Balial April 10, 2024. Tweet. The unnamed narrator ( Hoa Xuande) of "The Sympathizer" flees the fall of Saigon as a refugee and lands up in sunny Los Angeles in the late '70s. Like many immigrants in America, he suffers racist insults, works jobs he doesn't particularly enjoy or want to do, and struggles to feel ...
Movie Review: Should you watch 'Sasquatch Sunset' about a family of
Even so, "Sasquatch Sunset" from filmmaking brothers David and Nathan Zellner, is a bewildering 90-minute, narrator-less and wordless experiment that's as audacious as it is infuriating. It's not clear if everyone was high making it or we should be while watching it. Jesse Eisenberg and Christophe Zajac-Denek.
The Sympathizer review: a masterful spy thriller
Pros. Awe-inspiring direction throughout. An endlessly pleasing blend of comedy and drama. A densely layered story that invites multiple rewatches. Cons. A few unnecessary supporting characters ...

‘The Wonder’ Review: The Hungry Woman

Explore More in TV and Movies

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Email not verified

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Movies / TV

The Wonder Reviews

‘The Wonder’ Is This Year’s Other Florence Pugh Drama — The Good One

Editor’s picks

Watch Florence Pugh Take Fans Behind the Scenes on 'Thunderbolts' Set

'Rust' Armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed Sentenced to 18 Months in Prison

Is This the End of 'Bluey'?

'Secrets of the Hells Angels' Tells Real-Life Tales of the Country's Most Notorious Motorcycle Gang

'SNL': Ryan Gosling Is Still Haunted by 'Avatar' Font in 'Papyrus 2' Sketch

'SNL' Cold Open: Ryan Gosling, Kate McKinnon Recall Wild Alien Abduction

Most Popular

Verify it's you

‘The Wonder’ Review: Florence Pugh Discovers a Miracle

Most Popular

The Wonder review: An atmospheric tale of faith versus medicine

Related Articles

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

site categories

Stephen Farber

Related Stories

Full credits

More from The Hollywood Reporter

‘The Wonder’ Review: You Won’t Believe Sebastián Lelio’s Latest, but Not in a Good Way

Peter Debruge

Popular on Variety

Reviewed at Netflix Roma screening room, Los Angeles, Aug. 24, 2022. In Telluride, Toronto film festivals. Running time: 108 MIN.

More From Our Brands

Screen Rant

Review: If ‘The Wonder’ doesn’t quite live up its title, it remains something to behold

More to Read

Review: A sun-dappled Italian fable, ‘La Chimera’ feels like the discovery of a new language

An Italian director on her own wavelength didn’t seek out the limelight — it found her

Review: In ‘Ordinary Angels,’ a real-life miracle becomes one woman’s redemption

More From the Los Angeles Times

What ‘Civil War’ gets right and wrong about photojournalism, according to a Pulitzer Prize winner

‘Rust’ armorer Hannah Gutierrez sentenced to 18 months in prison

In trying to hedge its politics, ‘Civil War’ betrays its characters — and the audience

‘Civil War’ unites moviegoers at box office

The Wonder Review

What's your favorite Florence Pugh movie?

In This Article

More Reviews by Siddhant Adlakha

Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

UK Edition Change

Thank you for registering

The Wonder review: Florence Pugh is at home in this beguiling period drama – with a controversial beginning

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey

Join our commenting forum

Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article

'The Wonder' on Netflix: That Ending Explained and Your Questions Answered

What's with that weird opening?

What does Nurse Wright drink every night?

Is it true that Anna doesn't need to eat?

Why does Anna refuse to eat?

What's with the narrator at the end?

Is The Wonder based on a true story?

Related stories

New Movies Coming in 2023 From Marvel, Netflix, DC and More

More like this

Did you know

User reviews 2

Technical specs

Related news

More to explore

Recently viewed

More From Decider

'The Golden Bachelor' Stars Gerry Turner And Theresa Nist Divorcing Three...

'The View' Reacts To O.J. Simpson's Death: "The Tragedy Was The...

'The View' Forced To Evacuate Their Studio Before Wednesday's Show After...

'X-Men '97' Gives Gambit a Hero Moment You'll Never Forget

Holly Madison Says She “Tried” Exotic Dancing But Doesn’t Have...

'Captain America: The Winter Soldier' at 10: The Movie That Made (and...

Joy Behar Says She Was "Dragged Into" Controversy Over Beyoncé's 'Jolene'...

Guy Fieri Calls Drew Barrymore "Gangster" For Talking With Her "Mouth Full...

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Hijacking Of Flight 601’ On Netflix, A Scripted Retelling Of One Of The Longest Hijackings In History