Women Talking (2022) Review: A Vote on Faith and Freedom

Is Women Talking worth watching?

Yes, with reservations. Women Talking is a serious, often moving drama about women deciding how to answer violence done to them, and its ensemble cast gives a debate in a hayloft real urgency. Sarah Polley’s Oscar-winning screenplay treats faith, forgiveness and self-determination as questions worth arguing through rather than slogans. The reservation is its form: this is a film of speeches and positions, stylised in look and language, and at times it feels more like a staged reading than a lived-in world.

What is Women Talking about?

Women Talking is set in an isolated Mennonite colony where, for years, women and girls have been drugged and sexually assaulted at night by men from their own community, abuse the elders dismissed as the work of ghosts or the devil. When the truth comes out and the men leave for the city, the women have a short window to decide what to do. They vote on three options: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. With the vote deadlocked, a small group of women from a few families gather in a hayloft to settle it.

Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey and Sheila McCarthy lead the ensemble, with Ben Whishaw as the colony’s gentle schoolteacher, who is asked to take minutes because the women were never taught to read or write. Polley adapted Miriam Toews’s novel, itself inspired by real crimes in a Mennonite colony in Bolivia. The film is an American production in English and runs 104 minutes.

An ensemble that argues like family

The film’s greatest strength is how differently each woman responds to the same horror. Claire Foy’s Salome burns with rage and wants the men held to account; Jessie Buckley’s Mariche is caustic and defensive, and her anger turns inward as often as outward; Rooney Mara’s Ona is calm, curious and oddly hopeful, imagining a society that has never existed. Judith Ivey and Sheila McCarthy, as the older women, bring humour and weary authority, and their exchanges supply some of the film’s warmest moments.

What keeps the debate from becoming abstract is that these characters are sisters, mothers and daughters with old grievances and deep loyalties. The arguments are about theology and survival, but they are also about who has been believed, who has been protected and who has quietly carried the damage. Whishaw plays the lone man in the room with a tender restraint that suits his role as a witness rather than a participant.

Polley’s choices: faded colour and heightened speech

Polley and cinematographer Luc Montpellier drain much of the colour from the images, giving the colony a washed-out, almost archival look. The choice underlines that these women exist slightly outside time, but it can also feel like a filter placed between the audience and the story. Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score is spare and effective, used sparingly enough that the silences carry weight.

The dialogue is written with a heightened, literary quality, which is both a strength and a limitation. It lets the characters articulate ideas about forgiveness, complicity and freedom with unusual clarity, and several speeches land with real force. But it rarely sounds like people who have spent their lives cut off from the outside world, and the film’s thesis sometimes arrives too neatly packaged.

Where the talk becomes the ceiling

Because nearly all of the drama is verbal, Women Talking depends on the audience’s willingness to stay inside the argument. The middle section circles some points more than once, and the film’s refusal to leave the hayloft for long can make the colony itself feel underexplored. Viewers hoping for a courtroom-style confrontation or a conventional narrative arc will not find it; the film’s power lies in the conversation, and it knows it.

Who should watch Women Talking?

It suits viewers who enjoy ensemble drama, moral debate and stories about how communities decide what to do after harm. It also works well for book clubs and group discussion, since it raises questions it deliberately leaves open. The subject is sexual violence against women and children. The assaults are conveyed mainly through their aftermath and through testimony rather than shown directly, but the material is distressing and best suited to adults.

If its approach appeals, try:

• 12 Angry Men, the classic single-room drama in which a vote and a debate carry the whole film.
• The Shawshank Redemption, for another story about endurance and hope inside an institution built to crush both.

The verdict

Women Talking is an intelligent, deeply felt drama carried by a superb ensemble and a screenplay that takes its questions seriously. Its stylised look and theatrical dialogue keep it at a slight distance, and the talk occasionally circles, but the central argument is urgent and the performances make it land.

Rating: 3.5/5