Much more gripping than it sounds: Women Talking reviewed

Women Talking, which has received Oscar nominations for best picture and adapted screenplay, is one of those films that, on paper, is a hard sell. It is women talking, and talking and talking, after enduring the most horrifying experience at the hands of men. All of which sounds barely cinematic and even less entertaining. But as written and directed by Sarah Polley, it is compelling, gripping, powerful, as tense as a thriller. Think of it this way: it’s like Twelve Angry Men, but in this instance it’s Eight Angry Women (in a hayloft) who must reach a unanimous decision.

The premise is: women living in a Mennonite community – Mennonites are ultra-religious and shun modernity – wake in the morning with a sense that something terrible happened as they slept, and the physical evidence would appear to support that. They are sore, bruised, bloodied. They are told that it is ‘demons’ or ‘the result of wild female imagination’ but, as is eventually revealed, a number of their men (husbands, sons, brothers) have been spraying cow tranquilliser through bedroom windows to sedate them for the purposes of sexual assault and rape. Before you say feminist types will go to any fictional lengths to show men in a bad light, this actually happened in such a community in Bolivia – and not in 1704 or anything like that, but between 2005 and 2009. (One man was caught breaking in and seven were eventually tried and jailed for assaulting more than 100 women.) This formed the basis of a novel by Miriam Toews, a Canadian who was raised a Mennonite, which focused on the existential questions faced by the women in the aftermath. And this is what Polley has turned into film.

The movie has a stellar cast: Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara, Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy and, yes, Frances McDormand, who’s on the poster, which is a bit of a swizz as she’s on screen for five seconds, max.