Judith Ivey

Best Picture Oscar-nominee Women Talking delves into how solidarity is the key to survival when sexual abuse, including raping four-year-old children, is not only acceptable but condoned through Mennonite religious practices. Set in 2010 on a remote farm in Canada, it revolves around a group of women inhabiting a closed, cultlike, Christian community in which men routinely drug helpless women/children with livestock tranquilizers and sexually assault them in the middle of the night.

Both intimate and expansive in exploring weighty ideas, Women Talking lingers in its intellectual engagement, never cynical or dismissive, ever provocative and stimulating. Sarah Polley has crafted one of the best films of the decade, never mind of the year.

Sarah Polley’s cinema adaptation of Miriam Toews’ novel Women Talking translates with astonishing power. A push and pull between faith and feminism, the story centers on three generations of Mennonite women who re trying to come to terms with the sexual and physical violence they suffer within their small community. After years of sweeping the assaults under the rug in fear of the community’s patriarchal dominance and tradition, the women convene, in secret, to discuss their fate and that of their female compatriotes.

Those who enjoy ensemble dramas will likely appreciate filmmaker Sarah Polley’s Women Talking – especially those who support the #MeToo movement and who will gladly listen to some talented ladies who have a huge decision to make. In 2010, the women of a community who have had enough must make a decision about leaving their isolated Mennonite colony that allows the men to drug and rape the women while bloodily beating them in the night, initially blaming an animal like a goat or Satan or attributing the physical assaults as acts of female imagination.