Sarah Polley’s Women Talking is not a film that unfolds it detonates, quietly but irrevocably, like a truth too long suppressed. Set almost entirely in a hayloft where Mennonite women debate their future after systemic sexual violence, this could have been a stage play or a polemic. Instead, Polley transforms it into something far more radical: a symphony of female voices, each note trembling with rage, doubt, and hard-won hope.

The ensemble is extraordinary. Rooney Mara’s Ona, pregnant with either trauma or transcendence, speaks in poetic abstractions that cut deeper than any blade. Claire Foy’s Salome is pure incendiary grief her "I will kill them" scene will stop your heart. Jessie Buckley’s Mariche, all bruised defiance, embodies the paradox of women who both resist and replicate oppression. And Ben Whishaw, the sole prominent male actor, becomes the perfect scribe his quiet presence a reminder that some stories can only be told when someone finally agrees to listen.

Shot in desaturated tones that make the world look already half-erased, Luc Montpellier’s cinematography turns the hayloft into a sacred space part courtroom, part womb. The sparse score, with its haunting choral arrangements, feels like the women’s collective conscience given sound.

Some may criticize the film’s deliberate pacing or its refusal to depict the violence explicitly. But that’s the point: this isn’t about spectacle, but about the miracle of consensus emerging from chaos. When one woman says, "We are not asking to be forgiven for existing," it lands like a manifesto hammered into history.