Review
Culture
Trauma
5 min read

The overwhelm

What follows is an act of female emancipation. Belle Tindall reviews the Oscar-winning Women Talking.
a group of women stand and sit around a table lit by a gas lamp.
Women Talking's lead characters meet together.
Universal Pictures.

A trigger-warning to our readers: this article tackles the themes of sexual and physical abuse, which, for some readers, may make this piece a particularly hard one to read.  

The title to this film could be so many things: women forgiving, women fighting, women growing, women shrinking, women believing, women doubting, women conserving, women demolishing. If you find yourself settling down to watch Sarah Polley’s masterful film, you’ll witness eight women from a Mennonite community in America do all of this, and infinitely more.  

Women Talking will be unlike any film you’ve seen before.  

In an eerily context-less setting, the women of an isolated religious community come to the traumatic realisation that they have been abused, violently and systemically, for many years. This abuse has been at the hands of the men in their radically patriarchal community: their fathers, their brothers, their uncles, their sons. Catching one of these men red-handed, the women realise that what they had long been manipulated into thinking was either their own irrational imaginations or ghostly/demonic encounters, was actually sexual abuse perpetrated by the men they had shared their entire existence with. The men they had raised. The men who had raised them.  

Based on the acclaimed novel by Miriam Toews and inspired by a harrowing true story, the Oscar-winning script offers us a front row seat to the falling apart of an entire reality as these women begin to unravel all that they know to be true.  

Do they stay and forgive the men? Do they stay and fight to the (literal) death? Or do they leave and make a new home for themselves in an outside world they know nothing of? This is the question that drives the narrative of the film as eight representatives from three different families are tasked with coming to a decision, this is the conundrum that has the women talking.  

'This film tackles a truly traumatic subject with the utmost care, it is as empathetic as it is empowering.'

With a sense of specific time and place that is only given one opportunity to interrupt the narrative (in the form of a call for the residents to be counted in the 2010 census), there is a distinct sense that this story is tragically universal in its nature. As countless critics have observed, this film tackles a truly traumatic subject with the utmost care, it is as empathetic as it is empowering. It does not minimise the atrocities that these women and girls have experienced, nor does it sensationalise them. Through the immensely talented ensemble cast, Director, Sarah Polley has curated a spectrum of raw and complex emotion - brutal honesty, righteous anger, utter despair and rebellious hope are weaved together to create a tapestry of reaction.  

The complexity and care with which this story is told is a gift to the women who inspired the film, and to the women who will watch it.  

Audiences watch as the powerful rage of Salome (played by The Crown’s Claire Foy) is countered by the defiant gentleness of Ona (Rooney Mara), while the loud terror of Mariche (Jessie Buckley) is quelled by the silent care of Melvin (a transgender character played by August Winter). And, all the while, not one reaction is judged. Every woman is given the right to her own natural response, and the right to have that response shift and stretch and adjust. The dignity and love that flows out of this conversation is somewhat of a masterclass in the beginnings of healing and the liberation that follows.    

And yet, the film has even more to offer its audiences, there’s yet another question that is written into the rock of Women Talking, one which was articulated by the director herself  -

‘What does it mean to be true to your faith? What does it mean to get rid of the structures that have sprung up around your faith, that are insidious and corrupting?’ 

It is utterly fascinating: the women are determined to rid themselves, one way or another, of the men who have hurt them so deeply, but they refuse to be separated from the God whose name has been manipulatively enacted in the process. Where we are so used to the entanglement of God and the people who wrongfully use him as a means to an awful end, these women seem to demonstrate quite the opposite. And what’s more striking is that they do so, not out of obligation or duty, but out of pure love and hope.  

When the women speak of earthly things, there is a heaviness to their voices. When they speak of God, their words feel light.  

We see them recite the Bible in moments of overwhelm, meditate on it in moments of decision-making, pray it in moments of panic, and refer to it in moments of relief. It is their faith that fuels their rebellion, it is their belief in God that informs their desire for more. A verse from the Bible is ultimately the catalyst for their decision to leave, as they choose to re-build their lives on ‘whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable’. It seems that if the oppressors wanted these women to believe that they were inherently less than, they simply should not have introduced them to a God who tells them differently.  

One of the most powerful monologues comes from a bruised and bleeding Mariche towards the end of the film. She says,

‘We have decided that we want, that we are entitled to, three things… we want our children to be safe, we want to be steadfast in our faith, and we want to think’.

Her weighty words are responded to with tears and with a song. The sound of the women singing the words ‘nearer my God to thee, nearer to thee’ becomes the soundtrack to them packing up their lives as they leave familiarity in search of freedom, a freedom which is not intended to create distance between them and God, but to bring them nearer to each other.  

To watch faith flow from the wounded is humbling. To see the complexities between God and hurt play out in this film is captivating. It feels compellingly honest, and messy, and real

The Oscar win and the endless five star-reviews are sufficient evidence of the power of Sarah Polley’s Women Talking. But deeper evidence may also be found in the profound catharsis felt by those viewers who, in varying contexts, are trying to disentangle their faith from their hurt, or perhaps the curiosity of those who are left wondering what kind of a faith would ever be worth such an endeavour.  

 

 

Article
Books
Culture
Morality
1 min read

Never Let Me Go: 20 years on

Ishiguro’s brilliant novel is the perfect Frankenstein story for today.

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here

Four young people peer through a window.
Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley in the 2010 film adaption.
Fox Searchlight Films.

This article contains spoilers. 

Human beings are creative. For good or for evil, making new things out of raw materials is something that we can’t help doing, whether that’s writing new books, creating new recipes, or building new houses. Why are we born this way? Christians would say it’s because of the imago Dei: because according to the book of Genesis, the first book in the Bible, we are made in the image of God. If God created the world and every one of us, and if we’re made in his image, then it follows that all of us have this creative impulse within us, too.  

But if creating is something natural to us, does it follow that it’s also core to our identity as human beings? In other words, is making something that we do, or something that we are? Are we different from all other living creatures in this world by being creators ourselves?  

Although he doesn’t call himself a Christian, these are precisely the kind of theological questions the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro asks time and time again in his books. And nowhere does he ask them more powerfully than in Never Let Me Go, which was published 20 years ago. 

Never Let Me Go starts off as the story of three children at a boarding school. Kathy, one of three friends, serves as our first-person narrator; it’s through her eyes that we slowly realise something sinister is taking place. As Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth grow into teenagers and then young adults, it’s finally revealed that they are clones, brought into being thanks to advancements in cloning technology in a dystopian post-World War II Britain. They are brought up for the sole purpose of being organ donors. Or, to put it more bluntly, they’ve been raised for slaughter.  

Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy have a happy childhood at their boarding school, Hailsham. Their future is hinted at by their teachers, but they’re largely shielded from the truth. All around the country, we later find out, clone children are being raised in horrific conditions. But Hailsham is different, because its Headteacher, Miss Emily, is part of a group that believes the clones deserve to be treated humanely – at least until someone needs a kidney transplant.  

But, though treated in a ‘humane’ way, society doesn’t see the Hailsham clones as ‘human’, and that’s precisely what Miss Emily is trying to prove: that they are not unlike real, normal people. So, she encourages the children to make art. ‘A lot of the time’, Kathy tells us, ‘how you were regarded at Hailsham, how much you were liked and respected, had to do with how good you were at “creating”’. The children don’t understand why they must always paint and draw, but they’re told that Madame Marie-Claude, a mysterious figure, will collect their best artworks for a seemingly important ‘gallery’.  

Years later, Tommy and Kathy have become a couple. Before dying – or ‘completing’, as they call it – after her second ‘donation’, Ruth tells them that she believes a deferral is possible for couples that are truly in love. Kathy and Tommy go to Miss Emily’s house, their former Headmistress, certain that, as children, they were encouraged to produce art precisely to be able to prove, one day, their true feelings.  

They are quickly disappointed. Miss Emily reveals that Hailsham has now closed down, but that while the school stood, it was meant as an experiment, aimed at convincing the public to improve living conditions for the clones: 

‘We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all…we demonstrated to the world that if students were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent as any human being.’ 

Equating creativity with human identity does make sense, to an extent at least. In The Mind of the Maker (1941), Christian novelist and critic Dorothy L. Sayers argued that the closest we can get to understanding God as our Creator is through engaging ourselves in creative acts: ‘the experience of the creative imagination in the common man or woman and in the artist is the only thing we have to go upon in entertaining and formulating the concept of creation’. In creative acts, from a Christian perspective, we partially grasp God’s creation of us.  

Ultimately, however, being creative in imitation of God, is not enough to get to the very core of what defines a human being. There are all kinds of factors, from old age to mental or physical disability, that make any form of traditionally creative act highly unlikely for some people. By that definition, someone in a coma or a newborn baby is not fully human. 

That’s exactly the definition of humanity that underpins the cruel society of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. We need a better definition, and Christianity provides a unique tradition to help us on the way. A Christian concept of the human person is one that looks both at why we were made, and what we were made for. Christians believe that God made us out of love, and for the purpose of being in communion with him. He made each one of us as a special and irreplaceable individual, and for each of us our telos – the end or aim of our life – is to join him in heaven.  

If we embrace this definition of what it means to be human, then the extent to which we are able to express our intelligence or creativity while on earth doesn’t really matter anymore. If we believe that merely to exist is good – not to exist and fulfil our potential through this or that accomplishment, but just to exist – then we can’t deny that each member of the human family is, in fact, a ‘person’ in the fullest sense of the word.  

It is precisely this God-shaped hole that makes the concept of human dignity so fragile and slippery in Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro’s brilliant novel is, ultimately, the perfect Frankenstein story for the modern day. It warns us about the consequences of what might happen if we try to treat other human beings as things we have paid, but even more powerfully it shows us the danger of valuing human life for its creativity, instead of loving it as the creation of God. 

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since March 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.
If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.
Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief