The Wonder (2022)

[djross]

A little reminiscent of Manoel de Oliveira’s Benilde or the Virgin Mother (1975), including the deliberate artificiality, but here, the psychotherapeutic explanations, the fashionable revelations of abuse, the struggle of a no-nonsense female against the nonsense of powerful old males, and even some of the line readings (especially by Florence Pugh) all come across as somewhat anachronistic, projections of contemporary concerns and perspectives 150 years into the past – with the consequence that the whole thing comes across as having been designed to be a bit too easily digested. And it really has become an all-too-predictable cliché that this kind of protagonist will, in the course of the movie, be discovered by the audience to have been privately grieving the loss of a young child, and therefore in need of going through some kind of trauma-healing process, which the unfolding of the narrative will luckily ultimately provide. Despite these weaknesses, there is, as there was also in Donoghue’s Room (2015), a slightly complex and reflexive preoccupation with the importance of names, stories and the performativity of belief that does go some way to making it a bit more interesting. Although the worst excesses nowadays seem to be avoided, this film does still amount to evidence that the preference for images marked by the colours orange and teal is unfortunately yet to go completely out of style.