The Wonder

Based on a novel by Emma Donoghue, The Wonder follows a 19th century nurse (Florence Pugh’s Lib Wright) as she arrives at a remote village to examine a young girl (Kíla Lord Cassidy’s Anna) on her fourth month of fasting. Filmmaker Sebastián Lelio, working from a screenplay written with Donoghue and Alice Birch, kicks the proceedings off with an impressively oddball opening that seems to promise a far-from-standard drama, which ensures that the movie’s subsequent transformation into as underwhelming and generic a period piece as one could envision is disappointing (to say the least) – with the arms-length atmosphere perpetuated by a punishingly deliberate pace and almost total absence of compelling characters. (The latter is exemplified by Pugh’s closed-off turn as the one-note, needlessly mysterious protagonist.) And although Lelio has infused the proceedings with several stylish attributes, including Ari Wegner’s lush visuals and Matthew Herbert’s ominous, Jonny Greenwood-like score, The Wonder progresses into a sluggish, repetitive midsection devoted mainly to Lib’s incredibly uninteresting and mostly interminable investigation – which, in turn, prevents the third act’s revelations and twists from packing the engrossing punch Lelio has obviously intended. The end result is a handsomely-produced misfire that remains hopelessly uninvolving for the majority of its 108 minutes, and it’s difficult, ultimately, not to wonder what drew Lelio to this run-of-the-mill, underwhelming material in the first place.

** out of ****