While the title Women Talking (2022) seems demure, these women are actually trying to put words into action after a shocking revelation. After years of all the female-bodied residents of an isolated Mennonite community having strange experiences in their sleep dismissed by the men, undeniable proof is discovered that a group of men in the colony have been perpetuating these attacks.
During the two days while the male perpetrators are jailed in the city, the women decisively use this time to host a referendum which leads to talking out the tie between choosing to stay and fighting or leaving the colony.

My piece is intended to serve as both a recap and review for those interested in the movie who might also have reservations about the experience of watching, due to the whole film revolving around conversations on how to handle the truth of the sexual assaults and subsequent actions to take. While no act of sexual assault is depicted on screen, this film certainly tackles a heavy topic with rightful rage and righteous indignation.

Content Warning: Mentions of Sexual Assault, Miscarriage, Suicide, Deadnaming, Domestic Violence

TL;DR

Before getting into spoilers and descriptions of the content warnings, I just want to say that I think this is brilliantly and powerfully executed movie. I truly believe Women Talking would have been swimming in nominations this award season if it weren’t for all of the other strong films that came out in 2022, paired with the slow return of audiences to movie theaters due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

I honestly had no idea what I was getting into when pressing play. I didn’t even know it was about a Mennonite colony and then when the women were shown with head-coverings, I thought it was a riff off of an Amish community at first. I just knew it was one of the 2023 Oscar nominated films but hadn’t heard a word on anything else about it. I coincidentally happened to be watching this on International Women’s Day (March 8th), since that was the day Amazon Prime launched a limited-time free streaming of the film leading up to the 95th Academy Awards on March 12th, because it’s one of the nominees for categories Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay (from Miriam Toews’ novel of the same name).

From what I’ve read since, the motivation for Toews was partly inspired by true events in a Bolivian Mennonite colony and the rage and questioning that had built up during her time growing up in a Canadian Mennonite colony. While the sexual assault did not happen in her colony, the circumstances of patriarchal power dynamics could have easily led to such a situation.

Ultimately, I do recommend watching it and if any of the items summarized in the content warning are of personal concern, make sure you’re in the right head space to experience. Women Talking is passionate and a rather raw depiction of women advocating for safety and body autonomy while also recoiling from realizing they have been living in a barely-veiled toxic patriarchy.

***Spoiler Warning***

(NOTE: throughout this piece I have bolded the names of prominent characters.)
For years, the women and girls in this remote colony have been waking up to the aftermath of violating attacks; when seeking explanations, the male elders of the colony gaslight the women by attributing it to Satan, ghosts, bids for attention, or hysterical female imagination.
Finally, Autje and Neitje, two teenagers, catch one of the perpetrators in the act and he gives up the names of the others while revealing the men used cow tranquilizer to pull off the attacks.

Summary of CW:

Blood (but not really gore) is featured throughout the film. The movie viscerally starts on a clothed woman, Ona, waking up to the dried blood and bruised aftermath of a sexual assault. Another scene shows the bloody effects from a miscarriage, leading into the victim smearing that blood on the walls in rage and grief. There is shot of Greta with a hand full of blood and broken teeth. It is noted that at least one woman – the unnamed sister of Ona and Salome, as well as mother to Neitje – took her own life during the time the colony attacks remained unexplained. One of the teenagers, Autje, fakes out her fellow counsel women by pretending to jump to her death from the hayloft of the barn, only to show she has safely landed in a huge haystack. August, the man who is trusted to be present for taking the minutes of the deliberation, is revealed to have suicidal ideation. Mariche and Autje appear with face wounds from domestic abuse; Mariche also has one arm in a makeshift sling.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS AN ACT OF FEMALE IMAGINATION

I personally appreciate the decision of director and screenwriter Sarah Polley to purposefully not show the faces of the men within the colony who were perpetrators or who excused the perpetrators. Any scenes that include the perpetrators and/or unsympathetic adult males of colony are shot as: head’s bowed in prayer service, long distance, from the back, through the slats of a shed serving as a temporary jail, out of focus, in the shadows, indistinguishable due to motion, and/or framed only from shoulders down.
The women are the main focus here.
Their faces, their names, their feelings, their pains.
Their words, their votes, their deliberations, their actions.

When the men go on a 48 hour trip to the city to post bail for and return with the jailed assaulters – who were only ultimately sent there for their own safety from justifiably enraged Salome breaking in and attacking them – the women are told to use this time to forgive the attackers or be banished from the colony while also being barred from heaven due to their unforgiveness.

The women have been purposefully kept uneducated and illiterate as part of the colony practices. They use drawings to sketch out three options to vote on:

1. Do nothing; 2. Stay and fight; 3. Leave.

Ultimately, the votes are tied between staying and fighting or leaving of their own volition. Three households of women are then elected to make the final call. Pretty much everything I have recounted to this point is just from the first 5 minutes of the movie … now we can focus on the named cast, full of women with a variety of personalities coming into their own power.

Cast of Characters

I’m going to establish as many characters and their relationships to each other as possible right here. While powerful and effective for reveals as it was to be just dropped in the midst of the plot, while staying hooked on twists and turns, I had trouble keeping track of who was who until about halfway through – even with my default use of closed captions.

A Red Herring

The announcement in late 2020 of Award-winning Frances McDormand’s involvement in the cast – and as a producer through her company Hear/Say Productions – was the first actress attached to the project. I was surprised when her character, Scarface Janz, is really only in the first 10 to 15 minutes of the film. This is due to Scarface having voted for “Do nothing” and not suffering any discussion of the other choices. She insists on forgiveness and her granddaughters, Anna (Kira Guloien) and Helena (Shayla Brown), agree out of fear for being excommunicated from both the colony and heaven.

Scarface insists the women have everything they want here and when the others disagree, she snaps: “Want less.”
This biting remark felt particularly powerful to me, even as it reasserted disempowerment. Having a clearly well-established matriarchal figure spit this out as a slap in the face to the other women – who are trying so hard to protect themselves and their vulnerable loved ones – speaks to the unfortunate internalized misogyny of patriarchal culture that enlists women in keeping their fellow women down and subservient.

This household leaves in a huff and we’re left with the 8 women who are to be the true decision makers.

Family Players

16 year-old Autje (Kate Hallett) is the narrator of this movie. Sometime after the events depicted on screen, she is retelling this history to the now born child of Ona (Rooney Mara), who’s impregnation is strongly implied to have been the direct result of the very assault in the opening scene noted in the content warning section.
Autje is the daughter of Mariche (Jessie Buckley), a women who is sharp-tongued and disagreeable towards everyone present and every idea brought up. Throughout the story, it is revealed that Mariche’s husband Klaas (Eli Ham) has been domestically abusing Mariche and Autje for years.
The matriarch of this family is Greta (Sheila McCarthy), who suffers with ill-fitting dentures after having her teeth knocked out during one of the assaults, as detailed in the content warning section. Greta adores her two horses named Ruth and Cheryl and uses the horses multiple times as allegorical illustrations to ground points being made.
Greta’s younger daughter is Mejal (Michelle McLeod), who is shown multiple times smoking as well as having “episodes” – which are panic attacks induced by the PTSD she experiences through both the assaults and the subsequent gaslighting from the colony’s males.

The aforementioned Ona is the philosophical, even tempered cornerstone, patient orchestrator of the deliberation with mischievous levity who is visibly pregnant throughout the course of the depicted events. She is the oldest “spinster” daughter of Agata (Judith Ivey), a matriarch who is inclusive, considerate, and compassionate while also being practical in trying to keep the group on task.
Salome (Claire Foy) is Agata’s other daughter, a spitfire who is seething with rage and ready for action – as mentioned earlier, first appearing on screen wielding a scythe to break in the makeshift prison and fight the rounded up r*pists. She will do anything for her teenaged son Aaron (Nathaniel McParland) and 4 year-old daughter Miep (Emily Mitchell). This includes sneaking to a mobile clinic while walking on foot for a day and half to obtain antibiotics (considered contraband by the colony) with Miep on her back to get the little one treatment for a venereal disease inflicted from sexual assault.
Neitje (Liv McNeil) is an artist and Agata’s 15 year-old granddaughter whose mother took her own life when the assaults kept being dismissed by the elders. Due to this, Neitje now lives with Salome. Despite Salome and Mariche’s constant butting of heads and distaste for each other, the teenaged Neitje and Autje are very close and this is depicted in various ways – including them braiding their hair together.

~Side note: I can’t tell if this action is supposed to show teenagers just being teenagers, the connection of platonic friendship, a strengthened bond through shared trauma, or perhaps a hint at potential queer orientations that have not been recognized/allowed due to strictness of faith in the colony.

Trustworthy Men

Now that the women are established, I’d like to introduce the men who are allied with the cause.
Ona asks August (Ben Whishaw) to take the minutes. His family was excommunicated years before due to his mother’s outspoken desire to empower the women of the colony. August was able to go to college and only recently returned to the colony by using his credentials as a teacher to be of use in instructing the boys. August still harbors unrequited love for Ona from when they knew each other as children. His presence is of particular disgust to Mariche, who takes every chance she gets to tear into August.

During a break from the discussions, we are introduced to Melvin (August Winter, a nonbinary actor) who is a transgender man. Autje explains it was later on that Melvin reveals it was not the sexual assault that “turned” him into a man, but it led to the undeniable proof that he had never felt like a women. After being impregnated (possibly by their own brother) and suffering a miscarriage of the baby due to malformations, the trauma leads Melvin to refuse to speak with anyone but the children. This bond with the children has given Melvin the role of watching over them while the women figure things out.
NOTE: Melvin is deadnamed multiple times.

Now for All the Talking

Over the ups and downs from the cycle of grief playing out between all these dynamic characters, several points of debate are brought up that I find to be fascinating elements.
This is in chronological order as much as possible while also trying to both summarize and commentate:

Autje’s narration includes wondering who she would have been if the assaults had not happened to her, but how now in the present time that she is retelling the story to Ona’s baby, Autje no longer misses that alternate version of herself.
~She also explains something I’m super passionate about from growing up in purity culture (also often referred to as “r*pe culture”): this restrictive community does not talk about women’s bodies, so there is no language for violation, which leaves a horrific gaping silence that erases any chance of empowerment.

Greta uses her beloved horses as comparisons to if the women should flee, or fight, or look for a broader perspective on the whole situation.
~For me, this brings up the element of animalistic base reaction to threats and if humans should follow those behaviors … or if such behavior is inevitable. I personally think including these comparisons is especially intriguing because usually the idea of humans’ having animal instinct comes from concepts of evolution. Part of the reason I was raised in a strict religious environment was specifically to shield me from the heresy of evolution compared to the truth of the Bible.

Salome specifies that the elders want power and therefore need people to have power over, which are the women. Ona muses over forced forgiveness not being true forgiveness. Advocating for understanding what the women are trying to achieve with whatever decision they make: collectively creating a safe place of equality, education, and empowerment. When Mariche wonders if the imprisoned men might not even be guilty, Ona proposes the idea that the conditions set up by the men of the colony led to the circumstances perpetuated by the men, so in a way everyone in the colony are victims of the system.
~In a way, though this idea was initially a bit grating to me, it does seem to help the women move on from the “forgive or go to hell” threat that has been holding them back.

Agata humorously points out that they have never asked the men for anything, even reasonable requests, so the suggestion made that maybe they can ask the men to leave the colony being the first thing they ever ask of the men is *quite* interesting.
~I really love that they included moments of levity such as this into the discussions. I think humor is one of the best ways to cope when coming to terms with things that have negatively impacted your very being.

August confesses his love to Ona – offering to marry and take care of her and her unborn child – who responds by explaining that being married would make her not herself which causes the person he loves to disappear.
~This explanation being explicitly stated really took me by surprise. I realized that it could be interpreted that Ona is unwed *because* she was also pining for August during the time his family was shunned from the colony. However, her articulating exactly why she chooses to be solo is empowering and liberating. For me personally, I was raised to believe that my purpose was to be a wife and mother, so it would be a waste of time and money to go to college. Now that I’m in my early 30’s, never engaged or married, and a full-time university student pursuing a degree in Sociology that feels me with so much joy and purpose, I can fully appreciate what Ona is trying to convey. If the parameters of the societally constructed concept of being a spouse does not allow you to be yourself, then do not settle for betraying your true self.

When they get word that Mariche’s abusive husband Klaas is coming back to secure more bail money, it is first noted that there are no “cons” to leaving. But then concerns about the departure separating them from the boys – their grandsons, sons, or brothers depending on generation – leads to conversation over “not all men” being evil though also trying to decide when do boys become men who become perpetrators all while featuring a clips montage with the faces of the boys. Later, it is noted that upon puberty the influx of hormones makes it harder for these boys, who are still children, to not mimic the men. But August does add that while those 13 and older can be a threat to women, they are still young enough to relearn.
~All of these points are technically proven by the presence of August and Melvin, but it is another part that at first felt grating to me, since “not all men” is usually a way to dismiss the concerns of those who experience the brunt of actions made from male privilege. Also, I thought the clips that were up close and personal with the innocent boys was a very surprising choice when compared to the clip montage at the beginning where the adult men are faceless.

Mejal has a panic attack when debating if men can join their exodus, which leads to Mariche accusing her sister of attention seeking. Mejal explains that the gaslighting that made her disbelieve her own self is the worst part for her to wrestle with from the trauma.
~Wow, do I resonate with Mejal! Whatever my parents’ intent, being told my entire upbringing that I was too sensitive or trying to get attention when attempting to bring up things that upset me has caused me to struggle with internalized distrust to this day. It also has made it hard for me to see red flags in toxic interpersonal relationships because experiencing gaslighting was just par for the course of what I knew to be normal in what were supposed to be supportive and protective familial relationships.

As the arrival of Klaas inevitably draws close, Mariche lashes out at everyone while insisting they cannot leave. Greta realizes it was her own inaction and subsequent advisement to Mariche to put up with Klaas and forgive him. This leads to most of the women but especially Greta apologizing to Mariche for forcing such a false forgiveness model. Mariche finally lets down her guard and sobs with her daughter Autje over their abuse. After this, Mariche tries to be less combative and more collaborative.
~This change of heart is poignantly portrayed, showing how verbal sparring was the only way she felt she could release some of magnitude of anger pent up inside.

After suffering another round of beating, Mariche and Autje decide that they are entitled to three things: 1. They want the children to be safe; 2. They want to be steadfast in their faith; and 3. They want to think.
~Personally, I diverge from the women here over wanting to stick to their faith despite all of the harm the faith-based colony system has inflicted on them. But I supposed getting out is the most important step.

Agata calls Melvin by his chosen name instead of deadnaming him and he speaks to her, thanking her for saying his name.
~I felt this was a thoughtful way to show how community accepting and honoring a person’s chosen name aligning with their gender identity is super important.

However, this heartwarming moment is quickly disrupted by Salome asking about her 13 year-old son Aaron, to which Melvin’s reaction of hesitation leads her to realizing Aaron is missing while coming at Melvin in a threatening manner – which understandably causes him to refuse to speak. Salome running off in a fury aggravates the stress her mother Agata has been suppressing. It quickly becomes clear Agata’s health is failing and she will have a rough time participating in the departure but she refuses to be buried in the colony, preferring to die on the road if so be it. Aaron is found by Salome but he is resistant, so she ends up using the cow tranquilizer on him … a factor that only August is privy to.
~To me, August’s reaction to this realization holds a duality of understanding yet also envy since he is not allowed to join in on the exodus. Salome’s choice of taking her son against his will brings up power dynamics of parental decisions. When does a child become an autonomous person?

August then impulsively gives a gun to Salome, who wonders why he even has one in the first place. He breaks down in tears as he is unable to express his ideation but Salome realizes the original intent and pleads with him to not kill himself but to devote himself to the purpose of helping improve the colony.
~In reflection, it is interesting that the man the women trust to be privy to their deliberations ultimately and consistently needs the women to give him purpose. It’s implied that Ona asked him to take the minutes, not so much for posterity but as a way for him to have something meaningful to put his mind to.

In The End

We don’t really get to see the group settled post departure. It is revealed that Agata never got to meet Ona’s baby – who actually is shown briefly as the final scene of the movie – and Autje mentioned “later” a few times, such as with Melvin and that it was noted afterward that it should have taken longer to pack up their whole lives.

Even though I tend to value closure, I think having Autje as the narrator for this film adaption helps it feel like this ending is one of hope. I think the story overall is empowering – especially as a woman raised under fundamentalism, though not in a colony but definitely in a small religious, homeschooled bubble.

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