A Cross-Post: THE WONDER and its Netflix Film Adaptation

                                          (Original post can be found here) 

"This book will haunt me for days to come," I wrote back in 2021 upon finishing the book by Emma Donoghue. Based on a combination of true stories of fasting girls during the Victorian era, it was an absorbing read, quickly finished but haunting, like the best horror stories are.

It has been more than a year and it haunts me still.

My original review last year sounds so outraged:

"I've always believed that the most terrible of horrors are the real ones that owe nothing to the supernatural. This story... reveals the horror of blind religious fanaticism and hypocrisy, of what happens when "living for the next life" is taken to the extreme, to the point of neglecting good sense. This is the horror that we've seen day-to-day, when persons of authority are never questioned, when matters of belief are given priority over matters of common decency."

I was excited for the movie because it features the great Florence Pugh as our heroine, an English nurse sent on a curious assignment: monitor closely an Irish girl, who claims not to have eaten for four months!

In my experience, movies based on books often become too different from their origin, such that they should be considered utterly different art works altogether. As a reader, I'm always glad when a movie turns out to be quite faithful to the source material, or if the changes wrought somehow explore the literary themes in a deeper way. And this turned out to be one of those rare films.

(It's not a spoiler if I talk about the framing of the narrative, shown in the very first ten seconds of the film, right?)

The movie starts with a shot of a set in a studio, and a voice-over: "We are nothing without our stories, and so we invite you to believe in this one."

We live our lives in a frame narrative of our making. The power of suggestion is so strong that sometimes we see only what we want to see, and close our other senses to prevent cognitive dissonance. But this surety comes at a cost. Deadening our senses means closing our minds to new scientific information, and yes, to the wonders of a world more complicated and more beautiful than any one mortal brain can comprehend.

THE WONDER can be seen in Netflix!