On demand: "The World to Come"

Lost from view as the world went into Covid lockdown, the Christine Vachon-produced, Mona Fastvold-directed period piece The World to Come is to the American cinema what Portrait of a Lady on Fire was to its French equivalent: an absorbing, involving and finally deeply moving new angle on the whole business of love in crinoline and long johns, elevated by the kind of textured writing and playing you may have thought had been purged from today's cinema. It opens on January 1, 1856, with Katherine Waterston's heroine Abigail reading from her diary: "We begin the New Year with little pride and no hope." A black-clad farmer's wife in a frosty backwoods nowhere, Abigail has already seen a child die in her arms, and has resolved to dial down her expectations for anything beyond a hard, passionless existence; her diarising, which continues to float up on the soundtrack at sporadic intervals, is a ghost of the literary life a woman with her evident eye, brains and sensitivity might have enjoyed had she been born in another time and place. Alas, in this world, she's married to Casey Affleck. Still, we are not set down here to mope and suffer, rather to feel our way toward rapture. We get a hint of it with the arrival in town, just ahead of spring's first shoots, of Tallie (Vanessa Kirby): red-haired, roughly the same age as Abigail, modern in her outlook and dress, visibly very fond of her new companion and confidante. Alas Tallie, too, has a beardy-mumbly indie man waiting for her back at home (Christopher Abbott), and this is several decades before anyone really had the right vocabulary for queerness, open relationships and polyamory. For some while in The World to Come, the people appear every bit as penned in as their livestock.

We, however, can spend that time enjoying the textbook pleasures of the period drama: handsome, foursquare production design (albeit, in this instance, applied to the draughty shacks of second-generation settlers with barely two sous to rub together), mutedly pretty costumes, a feel for a scrap of land at different times of the year, first buffeted by snowstorms, and then - by the annual miracle of nature - renewed promise. Composer Daniel Blumberg's mournful slide guitar keeps threatening to segue (not inappropriately) into Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game". Jim Shepard and Ron Hanson's script, meanwhile, offers abundant lessons in the practicalities of living at this particular historical moment, including an improbable cure for fever. (An enema with molasses: these people had no word for Lemsip, either.) The whole construction - and the film rapidly puts down foundations and assumes that solidity - is elevated by a genuine rarity: an absolutely essential, distinctly Malickian voiceover that opens up the drama, letting on what Waterston's Abigail can only elegantly gesture at onscreen, whether doubts, fears or hidden but swelling passions. What's truly poignant about The World to Come is that the world it describes is so small and ordinary, so indifferent to the happiness of its inhabitants. (In this exploratory, ill-connected America, you can consider yourself lucky if you don't perish amid a harsh winter frost.) Yet within it, Fastvold and her collaborators spy a window of opportunity, a moment or two to be seized, and with those a chance to escape the past and emerge somewhere closer to our liberated present. There will be obstacles: Affleck and Abbott describe men who are not insensible but very much of their time, unhappy and longing in their own way, fearful for good reason, possessive and potentially murderous with it. Yet the movie finally chooses love, inviting its superb female leads to let down their guard as with their hair and create something all the more precious for being so precarious: a cabin of their own.

The World to Come is available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube.