Pugh’s portrayal of Wright is also, perhaps inevitably, more sympathetic than Donoghue’s. Unlike most of those around her, Donoghue’s Wright cares for Anna because of who she is, not what she represents.

While Donoghue’s Wright has known great pain, it’s not the central reason for her devotion to Anna. In the novel, Donoghue spends far less time on Wright’s losses than on her subsequent experiences as a nurse in the Crimean War. Unfortunately, these decisions are undermined by an outsized emphasis on Wright’s personal losses, and on the resulting implication that for Wright, Anna fills an empty space. Her face is set, seemingly expressionless, but Pugh can telegraph multiple emotions with the twitch of a jaw: as Wright chews in the shadows, we see discomfort, mild disgust, and resolution, but no suggestion of resignation or fear. In the creaking, dripping darkness of a ship’s cabin, Wright sits at the end of a makeshift table, eating. And while filmmakers might like to believe that their audiences “are nothing without stories,” the most urgent message of The Wonder is that underneath the stories we tell ourselves and one another, we are all flesh and blood and bone.įortunately, this sequence ends quickly, and the sweeping camera settles on the resolute face of Lib Wright (Florence Pugh), an English nurse en route to Ireland in 1862-only a few years after the Great Famine has killed an estimated one million Irish by disease and starvation and driven another million to emigrate. Yes, some of its characters “believe in their stories with complete devotion,” but some do not, and some of those use the power of stories to malevolent ends. Yes, The Wonder is only a story, but it is inspired by devastatingly consequential historical events. Not only is the framing pretentious and unnecessary, as many have noted, but its message is almost entirely at odds with Donoghue’s novel and Lelio’s own film. This “it’s only a story about stories” device, which is not part of the book but frames-and at one point, awkwardly interrupts-the film, is a bafflingly terrible intervention by director Sebastián Lelio. And so we invite you to believe in this one.” The people you are about to meet, the characters, believe in their stories with complete devotion. The beginning of a film called The Wonder. After the bare-bones opening credits, we hear the voice of Irish actor Niamh Algar: “This is the beginning. The otherwise excellent adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel The Wonder(2016) begins with a slow pan of a cavernous film studio, showing sets perched in scaffolding, camera equipment arrayed in bins and cases, and cables snaking across a hospital-green concrete floor.

The wonder emma donoghue review