Mona Fastvold (2020)
Mona Fastvold is best known as the co-writer with Brady Corbet (her life partner) of the screenplays for his three feature films to date (The Childhood of a Leader (2015), Vox Lux (2018) and The Brutalist (2024)). Fastvold and Corbet also scripted her debut feature, The Sleepwalker (2014), but neither name is on the writing credits for this, the second film she directed. The World to Come, written by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard, is an adaptation of the latter’s 2017 short story of the same name. The film’s diary narrative, which I’m guessing replicates Shepard’s original, is one of its big problems. The World to Come, despite some very good acting, is exasperating.
In the mid-1850s, in Schoharie County, New York, two married couples are trying to make a living, farming. It’s a hardscrabble existence, especially for narrator Abigail (Katherine Waterston) and her husband Dyer (Casey Affleck), even though they own their property. Their neighbour Finney (Christopher Abbott), married to Tallie (Vanessa Kirby) and tenant of ‘the Zebrun farm’, can afford better equipment than Dyer. The story begins on New Year’s Day 1856, so the start of Abigail’s new diary. Its entries dominate The World to Come throughout, to soon frustrating effect. When the diary quotes remarks made or silent reactions perceived, you wish that Fastvold would entrust these to her capable cast; instead, she sometimes reduces the actors to visual-aid supplements to Abigail’s narrative – mouthing words that she tells us were spoken, giving looks that she explains. We soon learn from what Abigail confides to the diary, and from flashbacks, that she and Dyer recently lost their only child, four-year-old Nellie (Karina Ziana Gerasim), to diphtheria. While they both miss Nellie badly, Dyer is now ready to try for another baby whereas his wife feels it’s too soon. But Abigail cheers up, some of the time anyway, once she makes the acquaintance of Tallie.
At an early stage, Abigail tells Dyer she would like to buy an atlas. ‘I suppose there are more frivolous purchases one could make,’ he replies. When she points out that she has ninety cents of her own and can’t imagine how she could better spend the money, Dyer suggests that she could buy her husband a gift. Her reply is, ‘What better gift could I give him than a wife who is no longer a dullard?’ If Dyer’s remark isn’t meant entirely seriously, Abigail is deadly earnest – ‘My self-education seems the only way to keep my unhappiness from overwhelming me,’ her diary then records. The atlas announces itself as an object of obvious symbolic importance: she longs to broaden her limited horizons. On Abigail’s birthday, in mid-February, Tallie arrives with gifts that include an atlas, making clear that she’ll be her friend’s passport to new realms of experience. (Dyer, returning from town, produces presents too but they hardly compare – a box of raisins, ‘that needle case you’ve been needing’ and a tin of sardines. ‘You spoil me,’ is Abigail’s laconic response.) Within a matter of weeks, the two wives have become lovers. Tallie’s gift, although not a world atlas, does cover the whole of the United States and will come in useful at the film’s high-summer climax, when she and Finney suddenly and unexpectedly leave the Zebrun farm. Abigail receives a letter from Tallie in Onandaga County, north of Syracuse, some eighty miles from Schoharie County. Desperate to see the light of her life again, Abigail sets out, with Dyer, to visit Tallie in her new surroundings.
The diary’s dominance in The World to Come, designed to compensate for a woman’s lack of voice in the setting of the story, isn’t the script’s only maddening feature. The characters sometimes say things that make little or no sense in their context. After giving Abigail her birthday presents, Tallie, in response to Abigail’s asking how Finney is, mentions some of his many dislikeable qualities. ‘I resolved to visit you so that there would be something in my day other than his meanness,’ says Tallie – but she would surely have visited anyway to give Abigail presents on her birthday? (She’ll visit again at times when the line about Finney’s ‘meanness’ would be better used.) Dyer, after handing over his presents, notices Tallie’s – ‘Oh, you got gifts from your new friend’. ‘She left hours ago,’ Abigail hurriedly replies. Dyer, who saw Tallie departing just as he arrived home, says so. Abigail doesn’t dispute this; she says nothing more and nor does Dyer, although he must wonder why his wife told a blatant untruth – he doesn’t at this stage suspect the strength of the women’s mutual attachment.
He soon does, though. On a subsequent occasion, Abigail, expecting Tallie, opens the door to Dyer. ‘Your smile stopped,’ he says, ‘was it meant for someone else?’ Just as he’s leaving the house, Tallie arrives, Dyer observing that ‘the smile returns’. But Katherine Waterston isn’t smiling, either when Abigail opens the door to Dyer or when she catches sight of Tallie. It would be easier to accept Dyer’s remarks as perceptiveness – that Abigail is inwardly smiling or unsmiling – if Mona Fastvold didn’t spend rather more screen time showing him as oblivious or indifferent to his wife’s feelings. For what proves to be their final visit to Tallie and Finney’s for dinner, Abigail buys herself a blue dress very different from her usual plain, neutral-coloured clothes. Dyer makes no comment on this, even though the dress cost two and a half dollars and he queried Abigail’s spending cents on an atlas.
At this last supper, the animosity between Tallie and Finney is plain to see – for Abigail, so are marks on her lover’s neck, although Tallie explains them away as caused by a fall. Deeply worried that she’s not heard from Tallie for a full week, Abigail prevails on Dyer to go with her to the Zebrun farm, which they find deserted, except for a piece of bloodstained cloth. Abigail wants to call in the local sheriff but Dyer makes enquiries of neighbours, one of whom tells him she saw Finney drive away late one evening – she thinks but isn’t sure that Tallie was seated beside her husband in the cart. Tallie’s eventual letter, lamenting the conditions of the place where she and Finney now live, does nothing to reassure Abigail, who’s determined to travel to Onandaga County. Her and Dyer’s arrival at the backwoods house there is another moment in The World to Come that doesn’t add up – Abigail starts yelling at Finney, demanding to see Tallie, as soon as she sees him standing outside the house. Or, rather, it wouldn’t add up if Fastvold hadn’t inserted in the meantime a short sequence that sees Finney (somehow) kill his wife while they dance together at their new home. It’s another vexing aspect of Abigail’s diary that, despite its implication that Abigail is telling the entire story, Fastvold includes occasional sequences that don’t involve the protagonist. This is particularly confusing when there are also bits – notably Abigail’s closing conversation, during which Dyer disappears and the deceased Tallie replaces him on screen and in the conversation – that Abigail must be imagining. It can’t be, though, that she imagines the dance of death between Tallie and Finney: distraught Abigail would hardly visualise her beloved’s murder at her husband’s hands in such sinister-lyrical imagery.
It’s increasingly difficult to get a handle on Dyer’s behaviour in the climactic stages of the story. He agrees to take Abigail to the Zebrun farm. After reasonably pointing out that the sheriff won’t investigate a crime when there’s no real evidence that one has been committed, Dyer offers to try and find out more about the circumstances of Finney and Tallie’s departure. Yet when this fails to pacify Abigail, he ‘tied me to a chair and administered laudanum’. When, after receiving Tallie’s letter, Abigail still wants to travel to Onandaga County, ‘Dyer refused first to permit my departure’, although he doesn’t try to prevent it. He then ‘refused to accompany me, and only caught up to the cart at the end of our property and climbed aboard’. Finney is a comparatively understandable character to the extent that it’s obvious from the start he’s a nasty piece of work. He gradually emerges as a religious tyrant: according to Tallie, her husband ‘reads aloud instructions for wives from the Old Testament but when it comes to the Bible, I have to say that there are a lot of passages he may know word for word, but which haven’t touched his heart’. It’s unclear, however, quite how vicious Finney is meant to be in what he says. He and Tallie are childless and children, he tells Abigail and Dyer on one of their earlier dinner visits, are ‘a sore point in this household – and yours, I’d expect’. We don’t know if Tallie has told Finney that their new friends have been but are no longer parents; just as we don’t know, when he later lies to Abigail that Tallie died of diphtheria, if Finney chooses a cause of death that will be especially painful to Abigail because of Nellie.
Whatever these details are meant to signify, The World to Come skirts a more important question. We get that there are tensions and antipathies in both marriages, as well as the message that Finney and Dyer, in their different ways, are to blame: the husbands should be more sympathetic towards, and interested in, their wives. But Fastvold and her screenwriters – perhaps because they aren’t sufficiently interested in the two male characters – are vague as to how much Dyer and Finney are automatic chauvinists and how much angry cuckolds – or what difference it makes to their injured vanity that their wives are lesbian lovers rather than involved with other men.
The small cast compels attention, though. Katherine Waterston’s portrait of Abigail is scrupulously consistent. That, alas, makes it wearisome too but it’s not Waterston’s fault that her character has so much to say and a predominant mood. A compensation is that Abigail’s woebegone looks and tone give her plenty of scope to brighten in Tallie’s company. From the moment Tallie first appears, Vanessa Kirby livens things up. She has a vocal and gestural freedom, a variety of mood and in the tempo of her line readings, that are very welcome. Christopher Abbott (who also appeared in The Sleepwalker and is in the cast for Fastvold’s forthcoming third feature, Ann Lee) has a cruder role than any of his three co-stars but he plays it well enough. ‘It’s been my experience,’ Abigail tells Tallie, ‘that it’s not always those who show the least who actually feel the least’. While there’s little suggestion that Abigail sees Dyer as an example of this, her words are a good description of Casey Affleck’s acting trademark. As usual, apparent emotional minimalism – in his voice, face and movement – is very different in its effect: Affleck is highly expressive. And there are occasional moments when direction and script are kinder to Dyer – when, for example, he has a fever, which Abigail nurses him through. When he’s weak, he’s more frankly affectionate than usual.
If Vanessa Kirby’s Tallie sometimes seems incongruously modern in this mid-nineteenth-century setting, that accords with an important quality of the film as a whole: its title hints at freedoms of thought and expression for women beyond the time and place of Mona Fastvold’s narrative. Those freedoms include self-expression in writing, illustrated mainly through Abigail’s diary but also in love poems that Tallie writes to her. Unfortunately, some of The World to Come’s spoken English is also self-consciously literary – and implausibly so. The formal language can be witty – as when Abigail, concerned about her husband’s fever, asks Dyer to promise that he won’t die and he replies, ‘That would be the opposite of my intention’. But when he comes home at the end of a working day to find his wife inactive and no evening meal on the go, it’s hard to understand why, since he’s annoyed, he comes out with the stiff reprimand ‘You haven’t accomplished any of your responsibilities’. Some exchanges between Abigail and Tallie are even more stilted: if this is meant to convey how imprisoned the women are in a man’s world, it’s unconvincing. The film’s sinuous, subtly unpredictable music is a real bonus, though. It’s by Daniel Blumberg, who would go on to write the Oscar-winning score for The Brutalist.
11 July 2025
