McCarthy, as an egregiously harmed elder and a guilt-ridden parent, conjures up generations of unspoken violation. Buckley commandingly lashes out in confusion and fury. Mara manages a wistful, dreamy measuredness that can’t quite hide the sadness that has descended over Ona's life. The actors nimbly maneuver both the old-fashioned formality of the dialogue and the script’s swells of anger and loss with striking clarity and mettle. Foy painfully illustrates Salome's apoplexy about what was done to her daughter. For much of Women Talking, this approach works well. Polley’s main interest seems to be in her actors, though, fitting as she was once (and may still be again?) a beguiling actor herself. Polley calmly films this as one might a play, interrupting the proceedings on occasion for a cinematic bit of music or montage. Hence the blunt title, so vast in its simplicity. The fundamental urgency of their inquiry feels refreshingly direct, radical even.

The core question of the text is what is tolerable, what is fixable, and what merits only the productive revolution of abandonment. Women Talking is mounted as something of a Socratic dialogue, dense with conundrums particular to these women and with more general philosophical and social pertinence. But author Miriam Toews and now filmmaker Sarah Polley, who directs this adaptation of Toews’s novel (which was inspired by a real mass rape in a Mennonite enclave in Bolivia), sharply render what is so terribly, universally relevant about what these women are debating. These are enormous questions, and ones that might seem, at immediate glance, too specific and absolute to apply to the outside world. Do they stay and forgive do they refuse forgiveness and thus face banishment or do they fight? Meanwhile, the women are considering a set of options. The perpetrators have been hauled off to jail, the other men following after them with bail money. A community of Mennonite women, isolated and illiterate and deeply devout, are processing a hideous crime: many of them have been systemically drugged and raped by men in their colony. The new film Women Talking, now screening at the Toronto International Film Festival after a Telluride premiere, is about an extreme circumstance.

Toews women talking