She makes her disembodied voice address its own disembodiment-her own alienation from her body and from the material world as a result of the physical and mental attacks that she has endured. While the narration is a practical concession to exposition, it also endows the film with Autje’s sharp-minded, analytical presence. Mariche’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Autje (Kate Hallett), is something of the movie’s overarching consciousness, by way of a voice-over narration addressed to Ona’s unborn child. Another is the one headed by Greta (Sheila McCarthy), whose older daughter, Mariche (Jessie Buckley), is married to a brutally violent man, and whose younger daughter, Mejal (Michelle McLeod), also a survivor of an attack, is aware of the destructive effect of the gaslighting that she has endured. One family is that of Agata (Judith Ivey) and her daughters, Ona (Rooney Mara), who is unmarried and is pregnant after being raped, and Salome, pronounced to rhyme with “shalom” (Claire Foy), whose four-year-old daughter was raped and infected with a sexually transmitted disease. When the latter two options come out tied in the lead, three families of women are delegated to meet and decide. The women hold a vote to choose among three options: stay and do nothing, stay and fight, or leave the colony. While they’re away, the women-who are ordered by the colony to forgive the men under pain of eternal damnation-rapidly organize. There, he’s put under arrest, and the colony’s men go to bail him out. Fathers rape daughters, brothers rape sisters when a man rapes a toddler, the girl’s mother attacks the rapist, and the colony’s men take him to a nearby city for his safety. Many men drug women (using cow tranquillizer) and rape them, and then tell the women that the attacks were the work of supernatural demons, or that the attacks are delusions, or that the women are even willfully lying. Its men claim spiritual authority but deploy it for temporal, practical, physical, and tyrannical power. Its residents are Mennonites the colony’s men have taken grotesque advantage of its hermetic isolation to prey on the women, who are kept uneducated. The movie is set in 2010, on a farm in Canada that’s also a closed, cultlike religious community. Polley is also the film’s director, and the cinematic package in which the text is delivered doesn’t entirely do it justice. Its enormous power emerges from its text, which is adapted by Sarah Polley from Miriam Toews’s eponymous novel. But it’s also a film at odds with itself. “Women Talking” is both horrifying and thrilling, infuriating and inspiring-a story of survivors of atrocities giving voice to their experiences and taking action to protect themselves.
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