HUNGER GAMES

Florence Pugh continues her patriarchy-smashing form with pertinent period drama THE WONDER. She and her filmmaking team tell Total Film how a Victorian tale of fasting and fables reflects the conflicts of a modern audience.

- JANE CROWTHER

When Total Film sits down with Florence Pugh in a London hotel suite in early October, she may be dressed in vertiginous Valentino heels and an elegant monochrome-print dress, but she’s snuggling under a tartan blanket like the no-nonsense Nightingale nurse she plays in her new film. The room is AC-chilly and Pugh isn’t fussed about also loading a bathrobe from the adjoining bathroom over her knees as well, despite covering her high-fashion look.

Like her character, Lib Wright, a pragmatic medic called to observe a ‘fasting girl’ living only on ‘manna from heaven’ in 1862 Ireland to discover if the phenomenon is divine or devious, Pugh isn’t interested in false airs and graces – she wants to get on with the business at hand. Which, right now, is getting warm (she orders tea with oat milk) and getting stuck into the meaty themes of her work. Which, as her director Sebastián Lelio points out, have numerous parallels with modern-day conflicts despite the intervening 160 years.

Having read the novel by Room author Emma Donoghue, the Chilean director recognised the power dynamics at play in a tale about the fight between religion and science, belief and rationale, the media story and the real experience of Anna, an impoverished 11-year-old girl. ‘It didn’t seem like a world that I didn’t understand, maybe because I grew up in Chile, under a dictatorship, in a very Catholic country,” he reasons. “I really loved Lib’s journey, which was the collision between reason and superstition, science and magical thinking. It’s all about a truth that is in flux. And I think that collision – spiritual and intellectual elasticity, against fanaticism – it really could be a thing that we are going through as a global society today.”