Whether the fast is a miracle or a hoax, Anna has become an attraction and, as far as the men are concerned, has drawn unwanted attention from gawkers and the press.Īlthough some on the committee seem ready to canonize the fasting girl, others are more skeptical. Anna O’Donnell (Kíla Lord Cassidy) does not eat, will not eat, or so it appears, they tell the incredulous Lib. At the village, she meets her employers, a dour committee of patriarchs that includes a doctor (Toby Jones) and a priest (Ciarán Hinds). Lib’s journey to Ireland is arduous - she travels by boat, train and horse-drawn cart, her head like a prow, her face a mask of stoicism - and soon proves more existentially difficult than physically challenging. How the child remains alive is the puzzle that Lib briskly sets about solving, fortified by her seemingly unshakable confidence in science and an attitude of clinical detachment. For two weeks, she is to closely observe a pious 11-year-old girl who’s said not to have eaten for four months. Set in Ireland in 1862 - roughly a decade after the end of the Great Famine that ravaged the country, leaving an estimated one million dead - the story takes off when Lib, a nurse from London, arrives for her new and uncommon duties in a remote village.

She’ll keep you watching and interested as you follow her through this perverse, provocative story about women, their appetites and a world that barbarically tries to control them both.Ī story of faith and sacrifice, “The Wonder” is a mystery wrapped in a welter of complications. Her character, Lib Wright, looks so self-contained and so manifestly uninterested in the other passengers that you can’t help but be intrigued by her. From the moment that Florence Pugh appears in the period drama “The Wonder” - seated at a table on a dimly lit ship and methodically eating from a plate while she gazes into some private horizon - you are with her.

Emma o donoghue the wonder