The World to Come
First screened and reviewed in August 2025
Director: Mona Fastvold. Cast: Katherine Waterston, Vanessa Kirby, Casey Affleck, Christopher Abbott. Screenplay: Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard (based on the story "The World to Come" by Jim Shepard). In Brief:
Is mix of modern and antique elements a bold risk or a mess? Image, sound are biggest strengths. Script less so.
VOR:③
Much more singular than "a female Brokeback," even if not all its ambitions are realized. Fastvold, a promising voice, is up to a lot here.
From photography to performance style to vocal work to design elements to soundtrack, The World to Come ranges from some assiduously period-specific details to some equally, intractably contemporary tones. Between those poles spans a wide, enigmatic, often confusing middle-ground. The intermixing of old and new resonances is so pronounced that it must be deliberate, but I didn't always know what to do with this movie's way of planting one foot in an alien, rarefied past and another in 21st-century idioms and sensibilities. I can't say I believed a lot of the voiceover or the performances or the romantic situation, which is a lot to be skeptical of. Regardless, while the movie unspooled its highly bespoke yarn, I was reasonably bound up in the unusual, often rich audiovisual experience and in the different types of yearning that emanated from four very different lead characters. Christopher Abbott is the only one of the actors I'd call a steady favorite, and unfortunately for me he's least central to this movie's design. Daniel Blumberg's score is a rare and curious oddity, which I like on principle and often as executed, even if the music seemed apt to the movie in some passages and in others more loyal to its own muse than to the film's. Both screenwriters, Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard, working from the latter's short story, have moved me enormously with their fiction, and I sometimes did better with the movie's language if I imagined it on the page, in either of their hands. But I wish that kind of mental translation wasn't needed. Should I just say "mixed bag" and move on? I guess something in The World to Come is stalling me from moving on. Grade:C+
(I posted this review simultaneously on Letterboxd, where you can comment if you'd like.)
