with Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Ben Whishaw, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey, Frances McDormand.

Available in theaters (as of February 2023)

Women Talking is a well titled film. The whole movie centers on a cluster of women, victims of sexual violence, in a strict religious colony somewhere in a remote farm, talking. They meet in a barn over several days in order to determine what to do about the constance abuse they suffer from the men. They talk. They enlist a sympathetic man, August, played by Ben Whishaw, to take notes on what is spoken during their debate about what to do next: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. The ones who want to leave have the simple enough reason, to protect their children from what they have suffered.

One of the women, Mariche (Jessie Buckley), would rather not leave, since she has two boys she wants to keep with her. The dialogue is earnest and compelling for the first hour of the movie. August is the only literate member of the cast, so even as he writes posters that show the choices, the women cannot read what they say.

At one point, a man is apprehended by the police for what he has done, but we don’t learn what the outcome is of his criminal charges. What makes the movie compelling for that first hour is the saintly nature of the women, their earnest belief in their god, their wish for justice, and their desire to forgive the men who have violated them.

“If we did not forgive them, we would be denied the kingdom of heaven,” one of them declares. At odd moments, the group converges into prayer, or sings hymns, which calms them. We know how distant this sect is from the real world by the intrusion of a truck playing a pop song, requesting people to come out and be counted for the census. The fact that only two of the young girls, but none of the adults, comply, is a sign that they do not consider themselves part of the population at large. In fact, some of the scenes are so extreme, the whole movie feels more allegorical than historical. Yet the title explains that the movie is based on a real story, something that happened in 2009 to a Mennonite group in Bolivia.

Sexual violence seems not unknown in extreme religious groups where men hold all power for themselves. The only man to participate in the discussions of the women is August, a teacher who had been excommunicated, and who as a result became educated enough to return to teach the boys only since girls were not allowed to learn how to read.

As the discussions sometimes turn to arguments, depending on how deeply wounded the victim feels about being raped, the movie begins to lose momentum. The rumination, the consideration of how to move forward, the genuine arguments back and forth, take up the lion’s share of the movie, but they are all in service to a decision that has to be made. Once that decision is made, the audience expects the characters to act.

Sadly they do not, for what seems an inordinate amount of time. Here is where a could-have-been love story is milked, and Ben Whishaw is in the unenviable position of acting a man who can never have what he wants, that is, the woman who is about to leave for good. I am not sure that it works, but the movie spends a lot of energy and effort trying to convince us.

The photography captures the landscape’s feeling of endless space filled with nothing but crops. The costumes, cut from the same huge bolt of cloth, demonstrate how constricted the women’s lives are. The acting, especially from the older women, Judith Ivey and Sheila McCarthy and a brief star turn from Frances McDormand with a huge scar on her cheek, is a cut above. The movie expresses the feeling of injustice that women face not just in religious colonies, but anywhere they are not believed when they have been raped.