The Wonder

It seemed to me a very powerful film, the kind that does not need to raise its voice to get under your skin. It is not easy-paced and it does not try to grab you with big shocks, but it builds a very solid discomfort around faith, guilt, hunger, the body and the need to believe in something even when that something is destroying a child. For me, it works above all as a very clear criticism of religious obsessions when they become fanaticism.

What interests me most is that it does not present religion as mere period decoration, but as a power structure. In that Irish village, the supposed holiness of a girl weighs more than her health, her pain or her life. Everyone needs the miracle to be real: the family, the neighbors, the men who decide, the believers watching from outside. There the film is very hard, because it shows how a community can wrap cruelty in noble words, prayers and social respect.

Florence Pugh is magnificent. She arrives as a nurse, with a practical, almost scientific gaze, but not a cold one. She observes, doubts, listens, gets angry and begins to understand that the problem is not only whether the girl eats or does not eat, but who has the right to tell her story and decide over her body. Pugh conveys authority and vulnerability. She carries her own pain, but never lets that obscure what matters most: a child is being used by adults who prefer a legend to an uncomfortable truth.

The girl also works very well, because she never feels like just a symbol. Anna could have been "the miracle girl", but the film lets us see her fragility, her obedience, her fear and that religious education that has turned suffering into virtue. It is terrible to see how a child can believe that disappearing, becoming thinner or sacrificing herself makes sense if adults and faith bless it. There it connects with something very current, even though it is set in the nineteenth century.

The criticism of religious fanaticism seems obvious to me, but not crude. It does not simply say that belief is bad. What it attacks is faith when it becomes an excuse, spectacle, control and moral blackmail. It attacks those who prefer to protect the story rather than save the person. It attacks that need to turn pain into divine proof, to look at a fading body and call it a wonder.

I also liked its atmosphere a lot. The gray landscapes, dark interiors, cold light and that feeling of dampness, silence and surveillance create a harsh world, almost without air. There is no horror in the strict sense, but there is constant moral tension. Every meal, every visit, every look and every question seems part of a trial. Hunger becomes a mystery, but also an accusation.

It is true that it can feel slow and somewhat repetitive. For a stretch, the story seems to revolve around the same question again and again, and I understand that some may find it too solemn or too contained. But in my case, that slowness did not push me away. It felt coherent with a story in which the important thing is not to run toward a revelation, but to watch how a shared lie becomes more and more dangerous.

The formal decision to remind us that we are watching a story being told also seems interesting to me. It may pull you out at first, but it makes sense: the whole narrative is about who tells, who believes, who manipulates and who decides which version of reality will be accepted. Faith, medicine, family, the press and the community compete to impose a narration. And in the middle stands a girl whom almost nobody truly listens to.

There is also something clearly feminist, though not underlined too heavily. Women carry the body, the guilt, the care, the obedience and the sacrifice, while the men of the committee judge and administer truth from a comfortable distance. The film shows very well that quiet violence of religious patriarchy: deciding over a life without dirtying one's hands, only through rules, prestige and convictions.

I do not think it is perfect. Sometimes the music seemed a little invasive to me, and there are moments when it could have been sharper or less solemn. But its virtues weigh much more: Pugh, the atmosphere, the sad beauty of the images, the tension between science and faith, and that powerful idea that a story can save or condemn depending on who tells it and why.

In the end, it remains for me a serious, beautiful, uncomfortable and quite memorable film. A criticism of religious fanaticism, yes, but also of the hunger for miracles, the need to turn suffering into narrative and the ease with which a community can call virtue what is really abandonment. I liked it because it does not shout, it does not sermonize too much and it lets horror be born from something very human: people who prefer to believe rather than look.