Movie Review: Women Talking (content warning: descriptions of rape)

March 11, 2023

I watched this movie yesterday because again, it’s one of the Oscar nominees. I didn’t really know anything much about the movie other than watching the trailer, and it looked really interesting. This actress I really liked from this series called The Crown, Claire Foy, is one of the characters in the movie and so is Rooney Mara from another movie I loved called Carol. Honestly the movie left me shook. It was a deep movie with a story that left me up at night. It’s based on a novel about an isolated Mennonite community where several men drug the women with cow tranquilizer and rape them, and the women in the community meet in secret to discuss whether to leave the colony or fight against their attackers. It is based on a real story about an ultraconservative Mennonite community called Manitoba Colony in Bolivia where between 2005 and 2009 a group of colony men sedated 151 colony women and girls with animal anesthetic and raped them in their homes. The victims reported being bloodied and bruised but these reports were dismissed as false. Eventually, the men got put on trial and sentenced to prison, but with anything trauma-related, you can’t just move on because the body stores trauma.

It made me think of a book I read called Room by Emma Donoghue, which is about a young woman and her son who are held captive by a rapist and they are figuring out how to escape the room. It was similar to Women Talking because it grapples with how the abused navigate their trauma after they leave their circumstances. It takes Ma many years before she and her son escape from the abuser, but even after she finds freedom Ma battles severe distress and ends up overdosing because she is constantly reliving the trauma she dealt with being captive in that room. Honestly, when I read the book I broke down in tears because it haunted me like no other book ever did. I couldn’t imagine what Ma and Jack had to go through to get out of such a horrific situation. Both of them were surviving in this situation, and even with the childlike innocence of the book’s cover (the letters “Room” are written in crayon), it is anything but a children’s book. It literally has sat with me since the time I read it, and it scared me. But I understand that Ma’s experience isn’t an isolated incident and sexual assault and trauma is a painful reality for many women.

The film Women Talking doesn’t show the sexual assault, but rather the distress they feel when they recount how this violence against women has gone on for so many years under the guise of morals and religious obligations. In one scene, one of the women at the meeting, Mejal, is smoking a cigarette and suffers a sudden panic attack after the conversation triggers a flashback where she is remembering the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of the men in the colony. Mariche, played by Jessie Buckley, says that Mejal’s episode wasn’t that bad because they have all faced sexual trauma in the colony, not just her. However, Mariche also faces her own past trauma when she goes back to the house to retrieve her daughter when everyone plans to leave the colony. She and her daughter leave the house very badly bruised because her husband beat them. August is a teacher in the colony who takes the minutes during the women’s meetings is August, and he had a strong female role model in his life who spoke her mind and encouraged him to speak his mind, too.

The film also talks about religion and the role it plays in gender norms. The women still pray at the meeting and one of the women says that leaving the colony is an act of faith. It’s interesting because when I was growing up the only idea of fundamentalism was a magazine cover of an Iranian woman with her nose cut off by the Taliban, but this movie showed that religious fundamentalism can happen anywhere, even in a country like the United States of America where we talk about freedom of religion and freedom of speech. When I was watching this movie with my friends, they made a point during a scene in the film where a man rides around in a truck and calls out for the women to leave their homes because they are taking the 2010 U.S. census. I thought the men were actually taking the census but then someone I was watching the movie with interpreted the U.S. census truck as a setup by one of the men in the colony, and that when the two girls approached the man in the truck and told them their ages, they were being set up. When the older women hear the truck blasting “Daydream Believer” by The Monkees, they don’t open the doors and don’t go outside in order to protect themselves from potentially being attacked. Another issue they talk about is what would happen if the women fought back against their abusers. It reminded me of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. In the book Lisbeth Salander gets revenge on her rapist in the most violent way possible, and earlier in Women Talking Salome (played by Claire Foy) is shown getting revenge on one of the attackers. Salome stands by her decision to stay and fight, while others talk about forgiving the men and leaving the colony. The discussion leaves a lot of food for thought, like what would the movie had been like if the women stayed in the colony and fought against their attackers?

It was also pretty powerful because Salome has August keep the minutes he took during the meetings so that he could share them with his students, who are all boys. So that they can learn about the repeated trauma these women faced in this colony, and so that they can unlearn these toxic ideas of masculinity and how to treat women. It reminded me of a couple of PSAs I saw from the Ad Council. These commercials came out in the early 2000s but I think they are still relevant today. There was one I saw a while ago, in which a boy and his father are out eating at a diner with the boy’s friends and they are having fun at first, but then they hear the couple behind them arguing, and the man screams at his wife and starts beating her in the restaurant. The father finds himself conflicted in that moment about whether to intervene or do nothing, and sits in pained silence while the man beats his wife. The scene cuts to the son’s pained expression after witnessing what just happened, and the screen reads that now is the time for men to teach their sons that violence against women is wrong. Because if the men don’t teach their sons this, then the men may grow up to be like the man in the restaurant beating the woman. The commercial left me with chills. Another powerful ad showed young boys going up to grown men and asking the grown men if they could teach them how to respect women. The first boy approaches a mailman and tells him he needs clarification since he has been getting mixed messages about violence against women. The second boy asks his uncle how he can grow up to respect women if he has such lousy male role models who don’t teach him to respect women. The last boy approaches a middle-aged man on the basketball court and asks him if he can reshape his attitude towards women.

I reflected on these commercials because around the time the #MeToo movement was gaining more traction on social media, an ad by Gillette, a famous men’s shaving razor and personal care company, kicked off a campaign addressing toxic ideas around manhood that have been perpetuated in society for years, and how men can unlearn these ideas and take action to treat women with respect and teach their sons how to respect women. It was in response to multiple allegations of sexual harassment against influential male figures in the media, and how sexual harassment also happens in daily life as well, and how men can change the narrative of masculinity by unlearning traditional ideas of manhood. The ad, titled “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be,” opens with grown men each looking in the mirror as the voices of news reporters talk about bullying, the #Me Too movement and sexual harassment. The screen cuts to an older Gillette ad where the slogan was “The Best a Man Can Get” and suddenly it shows a group of boys breaking through the screen and chasing after another boy, and then a distressed mom is hugging her son as his texts blow up with demeaning messages from the bullies calling him “freak,” “loser” and other derogatory names, and as the other boys continue to chase the boy through their living room. The scene cuts to a group of boys watching shows where men catcall and sexually harass women, showing how these young men are getting mixed messages about sexual violence from the media they consume and may think it’s a joke for a man in a sitcom to grab a woman’s butt without her consent. The audience watching these sitcoms, many of them men, are laughing and thinking it’s funny to watch, and then it cuts to an executive at a corporation speaking over his female colleague and her hurt expression. Then it shows boys fighting each other at a barbeque and instead of breaking the boys up, the dads all keep grilling their meats and chuckling as they all say in unison “Boys will be boys.” Then the tone changes, when several reporters report on allegations of sexual harassment and abuse against women. The audience stops laughing and watches silently and then the ad shows men who take action to teach their friends how sexual harassment is wrong. It shows men preventing their male friends from catcalling women and real-life videos of men, young and old, learning respect and tolerance not just for women but for each other. A dad runs over with his young son when he sees the earlier mentioned boy running from school bullies, and intervenes, and one of the dads at the barbeque intervenes and breaks up the two boys fighting. The ad ends when the boy sees his dad asking the boy being bullied if he is ok, and then it shows different boys looking into the camera as the narrator says that the boys watching today will be the men of tomorrow. The ads ends with a caption saying that only when we challenge ourselves to do more that we can get closer to our best, meaning that when men hold each other accountable for perpetuating violence against women or outdated gender norms that keep women oppressed, society will get better. This ad was similar to the Ad Council ones because it showed that men need to teach their sons to respect and value women and others and unlearn a lot of their own biases against gender. It reminded me again of when I was watching the movie 42 and there is a scene where Jackie Robinson (played by the late Chadwick Boseman) is about to hit the ball and a white man is with his son, and he starts yelling racial epithets at Jackie from the bleachers. The son pauses and doesn’t know what to do but then because he sees his dad doing it, he thinks that he needs to shout the N-word at Jackie too, so he joins his dad in screaming racial epithets at Jackie. I had a very surface-level perception of the scene, which was that it was shocking, but then my professor explained that it wasn’t shocking because white children at the time were taught that racism and discrimination against Black people was okay, so it took work for white people to unlearn this racist ideology they grew up with. In short, they weren’t born racist, they were taught to be racist. Similarly, the boys in the Mennonite community could have learned from their fathers that inflicting sexual violence on the colony women was okay, but August took responsibility for his role as a man in the community and decided to teach his young male students about the importance of consent and respect for women. One of the issues the women debate about is whether to just take their daughters with them when they leave the colony or to take their sons as well. One thing I had to remember is that the boys in the colony also experienced severe psychological trauma from learning about the ongoing sexual violence against these women, and so I would be curious to know how they navigated this trauma in their later years, because what happened in the colony was horrific and traumatic and it left scars on pretty much everyone who lived in it.

This film definitely impacted me in so many ways, and it has stuck with me well after watching it. When Sarah Polley, the film’s director, won the Academy Award this year for Best Adapted Screenplay for Women Talking, my family and I celebrated because we thought the movie was so powerful. It would have been a shame if it didn’t go home with any awards because it is definitely worth a watch.

Women Talking. 2022. Directed by Sarah Polley. 1h 44 m. Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content including sexual assault, bloody images, and some strong language.