kíla lord Cassidy: Last News

Florence Pugh must contend with faith and science in Netflix’s new film “The Wonder”.

The Wonder director Sebastián Lelio and star Florence Pugh joined Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles awards-season event to talk about their Netflix film and the power and fanaticism of faith. 

Florence Pugh is determined to get to the bottom of a mystery in the new trailer for her movie, The Wonder.

Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio has achieved a lot of great things in the last few years, ever since his career took off with the 2013 film “Gloria.” For one, A24 asked him to remake that film as “Gloria Bell” in 2018, starring Julianne Moore. Then the year before that, he released two movies in one year, 2017’s “Disobedience” and “A Fantastic Woman,” the latter winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, making it the first Chilean film to win that honor.

The Wonder is Gothic without the architecture. Set in rural central Ireland in the wake of the Great Famine of the mid-1800s, director Sebastian Lelio’s adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel methodically moves the chess pieces around in telling the tale of an 11-year-old girl who has locals mystified as to what God is intending by letting her survive for four months without eating. Atmospheric and intriguing up to a point, it nonetheless feels like much ado about a mildly curious situation that’s been milked for rather more than it’s worth.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic The Lord works in mysterious ways, Christians are fond of telling us. More mysterious still is the matter of faith, a uniquely human idea which operates on the principle that phenomena we can’t explain are true, not because we understand them but because we don’t need to. Set in an almost medieval-feeling 1862, “The Wonder” asks audiences to ponder the meaning of a miracle. Is it possible, as the devout residents of a small Irish community believe, for an 11-year-old girl to survive for four months without food? The child, Anna O’Donnell (Kíla Lord Cassidy), suddenly stopped eating, and swears that since then, she’s been sustained by “manna from heaven.” As word of this “wonder” spread, pilgrims have come to see the phenomenon for themselves. Local authorities understandably have their doubts, calling for an English nurse, Lib Wright (Florence Pugh), to observe the situation.