"Women Talking" - Film Review
Women Talking is quite aptly named. Most of the film occurs in a barn and is merely a conversation among eight women (Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy, Kate Hallett, Michelle McLeod, and Liv McNeil). These women live in an isolated religious colony and have endured numerous instances of waking up with unexplainable bruises. They’re told it’s the work of Satan or the effects of being a hysterical woman, but it’s clearly the hands of the men. It’s up to the women to decide what should happen next. Do they do nothing? Stay and fight? Or leave the only world they’ve ever known?
United Artists Releasing
Claustrophobic films exist in all genres, and while Women Talking doesn’t completely fit that bill, the movie does mainly exist within the one room of the barn. Intermittently, the audience is given looks at the world outside the barn through flashbacks, but the bulk of the action remains inside the barn’s walls. Women Talking is a new era’s 12 Angry Men. Instead of these women debating a guilty verdict, they’re arguing over the fate of their own lives. They have all the information and evidence, but they must make a far more personal decision.
Women Talking wouldn’t work if the ensemble cast members weren’t at the top of their abilities. The group of eight women who make up the film’s core are a fascinating mix of veteran actors and young women acting in a film for the first time. Buckley, Mara, and Foy will likely duke it out in the supporting actress category at the Oscars, and any one of them would be a well-deserving winner. The film’s one male main character is played beautifully by Ben Whishaw. His sensitivity is in stark contrast to the actions of the other men in the film.
United Artists Releasing
Perhaps it was a conscious choice to make the color scheme drab so as to not draw attention from the performances. The clothes are dreary, muted blues and grays. That’s to be expected, given the women’s reserved nature, but the rest of the film’s coloring is similarly muted. It washes out the actors and creates a sickly glow. The natural landscape that’s fleetingly shown in the film becomes flat.
Women Talking is a fundamental unwiring of heavily ingrained ideals. These women aren’t debating hypothetical outcomes on the basis of loose moral grounds. They’re deconstructing the only world they’ve known and attempting to discover what it means to be free. Yes, these women have the freedom to choose what they do next, but liberation doesn’t end there. They can’t read or write, they’ve never seen a map of where they live, they’re coping with the trauma of being raped, and, if they turn away from their community, they lose their lifeline. Not just the physical colony, but the spiritual connections they have.
What may seem like an easy choice to a modern viewer who didn’t grow up in similar isolation is radically life-altering for these women. The question of staying or leaving is simple, but the road to the answer is not. Women Talking is a tour de force, a fearless look at the way women lose their voices and the way they fight to get them back.
Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Letterboxd, and YouTube.