Review: Farm life turns passionate in 'The World to Come,' an austere drama whose magic is in its details

Passion runs hot in the cold of 19th century New York state in “The World to Come,” a slow-burn romantic drama where the details are everything.

It’s 1856, and a couple, Abigail (Katherine Waterston) and Dyer (Casey Affleck) are scratching out an existence on their small farm. Abigail writes in her journal about her loneliness, and her concerns for Dyer’s mental state: “He told me contentment was a friend that he never gets to see.” Abigail is also mourning the death of her daughter, from whooping cough, and worried that she will never have another child.

Abigail’s spirit is lightened when a new couple arrives nearby, Finney (Christopher Abbott) and Tallie (Vanessa Kirby). Tallie becomes a fast friend, who invites herself over to see Abigail when Finney is doing the disgusting business of slaughtering a pig. Soon Tallie is a regular visitor, and Abigail is beside herself in those spaces when Tallie is not there.

Director Mona Fastvold (“The Sleepwalker,” SFF ’14) builds unbearable tension in the unspoken thoughts Abigail directs toward Tallie and the slight glances Tallie returns in Abigail’s direction. Eventually that tension must break, with life-shattering consequences for all concerned.

Fastvold, working off a script by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard, steeps this story in the authentic details of the two couples’ farm lives, until one can almost smell the pigpen and feel the pressing of pen to paper in Abigail’s fervent writing.

Affleck’s quiet menace isn’t as flashy as Abbott’s pious browbeating of Tallie, but both men embody the unspoken oppression their wives endure. Kirby, so powerful in “Pieces of a Woman,” matches that performance with a strong turn as a woman willing to unleash the passion she’s feeling. Waterston carries the movie’s weight, as narrator and the vulnerable, yet forceful, woman who imagines a better world than the one in which she must survive. This quartet comes together to make “The World to Come” a quietly heartbreaking drama.

——

‘The World to Come’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 12, in theaters where open. Rated R for some sexuality/nudity. Running time: 98 minutes.

——

This review originally ran on this site on February 2, 2021, when the movie screened at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.