The Wonder — Florence Pugh turns spiritual sleuth in 1860s Ireland

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“This is the beginning of a film called The Wonder,” a voice declares at the beginning of The Wonder. The literal-mindedness is a knowing wink: what you are about to see is only a story. It doesn’t end there. The more of Sebastián Lelio’s taut little fable there is, the clearer the picture of the destructive powers of storytelling. To underscore the Brechtian point, while the movie unfolds in the rural Ireland of 1862, it opens on a modern soundstage, self-contained sets walled off by plywood. In one, the camera finds a bonneted Florence Pugh.

The glimpse behind the curtain may be riskier than intended. The sight of a film star in a crate reminds you just how artificial everything about a movie is: saleable elements boxed up for the green light. That much certainly applies to The Wonder, a clever prestige project whose neat assembly of themes and talent can sometimes seem to have started in a flat-pack.

Pugh plays Lib Wright, an English nurse drawn by a job to a remote Irish village. But nursing is barely required. Instead, she is to witness a miracle. (Maybe.) The wonder of the title is Anna, a chirpy nine-year-old seemingly sustained by God alone. By the time Lib arrives, she is reported not to have eaten in four months. For the local elders, civic and Catholic pride is tempered by a nagging suspicion of worldly interference. Hence the presence of Lib as observer. (Hedging spiritual bets, a nun is hired too.)

In hilly countryside, wearing 19th-century clothing, a man talks to two women; between the two women stands a horse
Tom Burke, left, begins as a ‘mutton-chopped rogue’

Lelio’s best movies to date have been his bright and celebratory Chilean dramas Gloria and A Fantastic Woman. Here, the mood is jagged and overcast, played out in cramped cottages gloomy even in daytime. Lelio works from a script co-written by Emma Donoghue and Alice Birch, each deftly employed. Donoghue wrote the 2016 novel the film is sourced from, as well as the screenplay for Room, the well-regarded adaptation of her own bestseller: another tale of a luminous child. Birch scripted the TV version of Normal People, and before that the caustic period piece Lady Macbeth, which gave Pugh her breakthrough.

Yet literary origins aside, Pugh’s role here can feel closer to the world of Marvel the star entered in last year’s Black Widow. Lib comes with the scars of loss, but also proves a fearless detective with a sturdy moral compass. The darker the web she discerns around Anna, the more she takes on the simple outline of a superheroine. (A possible spoiler here: for all the craft of the script, can the film mean to come this close to suggesting that the best thing for an Irish child would be English parents?)

Co-star Tom Burke has a similar arc. His mutton-chopped rogue of a reporter first gets a painful back-story, then morphs into the reassuring and familiar: a gold-hearted Mr Darcy.

Both Pugh and Burke are magnetic, cast as beacons amid the murk of The Wonder, where nightmare secrets and dogma thrive. Such backwardness is not for them — nor you or me. Instead, The Wonder is the kind of movie that flatters us for being smarter than most of its characters, if not quite as smart as the film-makers. After all, they safely confine their horrors to the past while still putting Pugh in a windswept shawl — the period drama ever popular as it is.

★★★☆☆

In cinemas now and on Netflix from November 16

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