Sophia Michaels
Psychological thriller savant Florence Pugh has geared up for another twisted story, this time starring in Sebastian Lelio’s The Wonder, the forthcoming psychological period drama adapted from Emma Donoghue’s novel of the same name. In the first trailer for the film arriving to Netflix on Nov. 16, the Midsommar and Don’t Worry Darling actress travels back to 1862.
Lib Wright (Pugh), a nurse from England, is an outsider in The Wonder. She arrives at a small village in the Irish Midlands to monitor a young girl named Anna O’Donnell (Kila Lord Cassidy) who has somehow survived for months without consuming any food. Claims that O’Donnell is in fine health despite not having eaten since turning 11 years old four months prior have been substantiated by groups of pilgrims and tourists passing through. Along with the village people, they all claim the girl has survived on “manna from heaven” — but Wright isn’t convinced.
“Anna is in danger,” she insists. “I am begging you, you must stop the watch.” Wright wasn’t the only nurse sent to watch over O’Donnell during the allotted two week period, but the other holds much more faith in the young girl’s religious explanation of her condition. On the 14th day, both nurses must present a separate testimony of their observations, but Wright’s concern grows more frantic — and O’Donnell’s family more overbearing — as a breaking point approaches and the question of whether O’Donnell’s survival is the result of a hoax or a miracle becomes more complicated.
“Bringing the powerful novel The Wonder by Emma Donoghue to the screen not only offers me the chance to portray the collision between reason and faith, individual and community, obedience and rebellion, but also to explore my own interpretation of what a ‘period’ film can be,” Lelio said in a statement last year.
More recently, during an appearance at Deadline’s Toronto International Film Festival Studio, he added: “It’s not a romance, it’s about two women. Also, I really, really, really connected with how the novel escalates at the end and spirals. I love that acceleration and how, again, the nurse, the rationalist, is somehow forced to transcend science and even reason, in order to save herself and maybe save the girl.”
