Arthouse Watch: The World to Come (2020)

Watched:  07/19/2026

Format:  Library disc

Viewing:  First

Director:  Mona Fastvold

I really liked Vanessa Kirby in last summer's Fantastic Four, and was aware she had a career a bit like Rebecca Hall.  Be foxy in things  After getting noticed in smaller stuff, do a mix of some big, silly crowd pleasers (Hall is in two King Kong movies and an Iron Man) while still doing smaller art films and some prestige pictures.  Do all the things.    

I happened to find two Kirby movies right off the bat via Austin Public Library, and so I've borrowed this movie, The World to Come (2020) and the Ron Howard flick, Eden.  

The World to Come was not exactly a critical darling, but pretty close!  It clocked in at a 73 on Metacritic.  And I'm not surprised that, especially in the political climate of 2020 - the year of the movie's release - it did well.  It got a lot of international attention.  It's a period piece about forbidden same-sex love, and it is very sad, and that is absolute critic bait.

First - before we get to the rest - the performances in it are good to very good, and I say that with no small amount of amazement for reasons I shall get to forthwith.  

Kirby is stunning in her general Kirby-ness, but also in the performance she delivers, which I think earned her some noms.  Lead Katherine Waterston is very buyable as a woman grieving her lost child and married to a man so coded as having the 'tism, it feels like an LLM read social media to write the part.  The man in question is Casey Affleck, who - at the time of the film's shooting and release, was probably hiding from Hollywood as he'd been very publicly #MeToo'd.  Which may have led to him appearing in a British movie filmed in like Transylvania doubling for upstate New York in the 1850's.  But do pity actor Christopher Abbott who plays the villain of our piece - for he is written like a red flag in 1850's garb and has to not twirl a mustache once.

The cinematography is lovely - the rural setting a fantastic backdrop, the interior lighting of the rustic homes handled phenomenally.  Photog Andre Chemetoff does some stellar work here, and hats off.  You can have a critical darling without this level of craftmanship, but it sure sells the idea this movie is good if it looks like a million bucks.

But, sweet Christ, is this movie plodding, ponderous, predictable and - its biggest crime - pretentious as fuck.  

I can tell you exactly when I turned on this movie.  It was when I had to turn on the Closed Captions not for the usual reasons, but because the dialog of the two characters - both the wives of farmers in 1850 - in speaking about raising hogs, used the word "asperity" as a punch line. 

I'm 51.  I read.  I have two college degrees.  I am fine with not knowing a word.  I am also a movie-fan enough that I enjoy some stylized dialog.  But it also needs to make sense in some sort of context - and dialog also needs to communicate the movie's ideas in a way that is clear on a first viewing.  

The notion that folks in 1850-whatever all spoke like the letters of the best educated and thought-leaders of their day is a choice.  And it's a choice I found tedious by the 30th minutes of the movie - it just feels like the third smartest person in your class who reads a lot really doing a flex.

That is - until when one of our two leads says something *daring* in the plainest possible language, and in close-up.  You know, so you know it's *important* and *maybe deep*.   Which you will know because of the serious beat the movie takes. 

These aren't acting problems - our leads are working their asses off selling this dialog that is the floweriest of purple prose - these are script and directing choices.  

The movie is also predictable.  There's not all that much happening - and we know from the poster "forbidden girl/girl romance" is the plot.  It will be doomed queer love - catnip for some viewers.  But it takes absolutely zero work to know from the tone of this movie that Kirby is not making it out of this movie alive (SPOILERS).  

Her character is portrayed as spirited and genuine and perfect and unwilling to listen to a word her husband says when he is, at every turn, portrayed as someone who has no problem killing things and is very direct about his expectations and how much it irks him she flaunts his wishes.  

And it takes it's sweet time getting there.  And when it does, it almost does it as a fake-out, just to really make it suck.  We must have profound tears.

So, yeah, the movie a slow, meandering path to get to the point.  Which is "things sure were not fair for women in olden times", and, movie, you are right.  Things were also bad for people who had same-sex relations.  You have cracked a book, congrats.  Things were super bad.*  

I would be curious how much research was done to get the movie written and made.  Frankly, I haven't spent an undue amount of time researching the first-hand accounts of women in that region in that era (it does feel oddly remote for a state that had been established for 230 years and was well-traveled in the 1790's).  But it feels like an oddly modern take at times, almost written more like 21st Century people forced into these conditions rather than people who would have known what they were signing up for.

I will say, I bought the romance between the leads - bought their connection in their particular circumstances.  There's a story in there that, I think maybe stripped of some of the pretense, I might have embraced more.  But it is also a movie that is more or less relentlessly bleak, and I'm not sure has anything particularly novel to say, so tries to make up for that in execution.  And the execution just wasn't really my cup of tea.

And I don't know why.  This should fit in neatly with films I have enjoyed.  The one that comes to mind first is The Piano.  But this ain't that.

There are, of course, a million jokes one could make about the title of this movie.  Or at least three I've thought of immediately.  But this is a class joint.

But, fortunately, Kirby was still hot, so it wasn't all bad.

*And it is baffling in 2026 when people keep voting to bring America back to 1850 when it will be very bad indeed for their children if not for themselves.