WOMEN

By Alex A. Kecskes

ADAPTED BY SARAH POLLEY from Miriam Toews’s eponymous novel and inspired by true events, Women Talking portrays a fight for freedom against tyrannical odds. Set in 2010, on a Canadian Mennonite farm, men have taken advantage of the colony’s cult-like confines to prey on women. Under the cloud of spiritual obedience, males have enslaved the opposite sex, keeping them uneducated and subjugated.

Through their tears, pain, and anguish, we discover the violent acts many women have suffered. Some have been drugged with cow tranquilizers and raped, only to be later accused of lying or of succumbing to delusions and evil spirits. We later learn that the attacks are sometimes incestuous—father/daughter and brother/sister.

When a little girl is raped, her mother attacks the rapist, who is quickly taken to a nearby city to keep him from “harm.” While bailing out the rapist, the men command the women to forgive the accused under pain of hellish damnation. Outraged, the women hold a vote to choose one of three options: stay and do nothing, stay and fight, or leave the colony. With a tied vote for leaving or fighting, three families of women are forced to decide.

The group’s singular male entity, August (Ben Whishaw), who received an academic education outside of the colony, has returned to take minutes of the meetings. His role gives rise to how the women have been contemplating the fate of their male children and where they hope to steer this misguided colony.

Perhaps most aggrieved is Agata (Judith Ivey). Her eldest unmarried daughter, Ona (Rooney Mara), is pregnant after being raped. And her other daughter, Salome must come to grips with her four-year-old, who was raped and infected with a sexually transmitted disease. As the women continue talking, we learn that Greta’s (Sheila McCarthy) older daughter Mariche (Jessie Buckley), is married and suffers the abuse of her dangerously violent husband. And yes, her younger daughter, Mejal (Michelle McLeod), also survived an attack.

Mariche’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Autje (Kate Hallett), provides somber voice-over advice to Ona’s unborn child. These insightful soliloquies underscore the hopelessness and rage harbored by many women in this dysfunctional colony. And yet, it is through Autje that we learn how many of these women feel about their plight. What’s