Academy Award Winner!

Even if Sarah Polley’s superlative work doesn’t get the plaudits or the audience it deserves, it should stand to have a far greater legacy. This is the kind of cinema that endures – not just as a great work of art (although it is that), but as something that moves us all forward. For the past few years, the women in this isolated religious community have been drugged and assaulted in their sleep, and told the culprits were ghosts. Unbearably bleak, yes, and it actually happened – Miriam Toews wrote a novel about it in, on which this film is based. The men have been imprisoned in a nearby town, awaiting bail, so the women meet in a purgatory-like hayloft to talk about what to do: nothing, stay and fight, or leave. Except what they are talking about, really, is how to reset or override a world engrained with violent patriarchal structures. The ensemble cast – with Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley and Frances McDormand among it – are on staggering form, and the subject matter is explosive. But Polley’s film is more like a hymn or a prayer, a gentle meditation on forgiveness, survival and how to make a better world. –Independent (UK)

“A remarkable ensemble of performers unite for this combustible, timely chamber-piece that hails the return of Polley as an ambitious and empirical filmmaker.”—Empire Magazine

“From the acting to the directing and on to one of the best screenplays of the year, it is a tour-de-force in every sense.”—San Jose Mercury News