Cooped up, cold, and lonely as she is, it’s no wonder that Abigail, a farm wife in 1856 upstate New York, is immediately drawn to Tallie, a neighbor who comes wandering over the hill, in the drama The World to Come (on VOD now). Tallie has a mane of red hair and a sultry flint; she’s a burst of light and possibility piercing through Abigail’s stifling isolation. Perhaps some of us might feel the same, now in the twelfth month of quarantine, should such a stranger suddenly (and safely!) enter our little bubbles.
The World to Come is directed by the Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold, based on a short story by Jim Shepard. (Shepard wrote the script with Western novel author Ron Hansen.) The film is intensely intimate in its design, its physical spaces appropriately constricting, its interior monologue pained and whispery. Katherine Waterston, as Abigail, narrates much of the film, reading from Abigail’s diary with the dreamy sorrow of Emily Dickinson—a would-be contemporary of Abigail’s similarly hampered by the bounds of time and place, but whose mind took her traveling.
Fastvold’s film has a poetic lilt, its exacting visuals nicely underscored by Abigail’s lyrical incantations. Time is marked with title cards announcing the day and month, a potent reminder of the tedious tick of the everyday. It is hard to grasp the quotidian reality of olden times—how strange and comforting and sort of sad that unremarkable Tuesdays have been experienced by so many people for so long—but The World to Come palpably, and quite miserably, conjures up that sense of presence.
Abigail’s husband, Dyer (Casey Affleck), about half lives up to the homophone of his name. He’s laconic, distant, consumed by the drudge of his work, a man either not capable of seeing or not willing to see his wife’s desperation. But he is not exactly unkind. They couple have lost their daughter to diphtheria, in a solemn echo of another recent queer film about women reaching for one another, Francis Lee’s Ammonite. A dead child haunts both movies, either a reflection of the hardships of raising children in medically primitive times, or a failure of men’s imaginations as to what might existentially ail a woman.
There is nothing maternal about Abigail’s attraction to Tallie, though. She is not a replacement for a mourned daughter, but rather a window to another world, where the complexity of Abigail’s passion might find room to grow. The film is careful to show that Tallie is not actually some savior come from afar; she has her own scary situation at home with her religiously fervid husband, Finney (Christopher Abbott), who makes vague threats to her safety and chafes at his wife’s frequent trips to Abigail’s farm. Tallie, then, might see something freeing in Abigail, too. What cosmic, star-crossed fate that they should find each other on the same Adirondack mountain. (Or somewhere else in New York State—the film was shot in Romania, so who can really tell.)
Tallie is played by Vanessa Kirby, one of the more captivating actors to arrive on the international scene in the last few years. I first saw her as Stella in a sleek, beguiling production of A Streetcar Named Desire, with Gillian Anderson as a supernova Blanche. In The World to Come, Kirby mixes the Stella with the Blanche, breezing into Abigail’s life as a jumble of excitement and need, though carrying with her the weight of her domestic life, forever in flinching anticipation of the brute at home.
Fastvold lets the charge between Abigail and Tallie develop gradually. It begins with a faint crackle that Waterston and Kirby persuasively synthesize; it’s as if a slight static shock has passed between them when Tallie takes a first tentative step onto Abigail’s doorstep. These initial scenes of bonding—between two women deeply hungry for social release, for some vibrancy in their lives—are exquisitely done. A scene in which Abigail, reeling with amazement, leans back against her plain wooden table and, in voiceover, relates her “astonishment and joy” is a lovely distillation of that feeling of first blush, the sudden cracking open that can come with the discovery of another person. How bounteous the world rushing at Abigail looks just then.
But as often happens in stories like this one, The World to Come takes a turn for the grim—though it starts out plenty bleak already. Abigail’s voiceovers grow repetitive and turgid as the film bows its head and dutifully trudges toward its tragedy. The film offers a small bit of emotional rescue at its very end—a graceful tribute to the escapes of memory and fantasy—but by then the dourness of its conclusions has blotted out any rounder sense of meaning. There is not much world to come, after all. There is only the one Abigail staggers through, lost in her own history, denied the film’s true compassion.
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