Women Talking

Polley adapts Miriam Toews into something close to a chamber play — almost the entire film is a debate, held in a hayloft, among the women of an isolated colony deciding how to answer a violence done to them. The light is drained to the color of an old photograph. Nothing is shouted that can be reasoned. What it becomes, slowly, is a study of how people think aloud toward a moral decision none of them wanted to have to make, and of faith tested at the exact point where it costs the most.