Much more gripping than it sounds: Women Talking reviewed

Women Talking, which has received Oscar nominations for best picture and adapted screenplay, is one of those films that, on paper, is a hard sell. It is women talking, and talking and talking, after enduring the most horrifying experience at the hands of men. All of which sounds barely cinematic and even less entertaining. But as written and directed by Sarah Polley, it is compelling, gripping, powerful, as tense as a thriller. Think of it this way: it’s like Twelve Angry Men, but in this instance it’s Eight Angry Women (in a hayloft) who must reach a unanimous decision.

The premise is: women living in a Mennonite community – Mennonites are ultra-religious and shun modernity – wake in the morning with a sense that something terrible happened as they slept, and the physical evidence would appear to support that. They are sore, bruised, bloodied. They are told that it is ‘demons’ or ‘the result of wild female imagination’ but, as is eventually revealed, a number of their men (husbands, sons, brothers) have been spraying cow tranquilliser through bedroom windows to sedate them for the purposes of sexual assault and rape.