Two wives fall in love amid the grinding exhaustion and violence of pioneer life, hoping to build a future for themselves
The World to Come is a tragedy and a love story – and also a puzzle, courtesy of the title. Does it mean the afterlife, the entry into paradise that will be recompense for all the hardship and injustice we’ve suffered here? Or does it mean the future: that progressive yearned-for place in which current bigotries will be abolished, and in fact the place from which we, in the 21st century, are looking back on this tale from the 19th, confident that we are freed from these bygone characters’ constraints, content that we understand what is going on and they may not?
The director is Mona Fastvold – who also wrote and directed The Sleepwalker and wrote the script for The Childhood of a Leader – working from a screenplay by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard, adapted from Shepard’s own story. In a wintry US frontier settlement in 1856, a farming couple have it brutally hard: they are Abby (Katherine Waterston) and Dyer (Casey Affleck). Both are equally disappointed with life and vaguely ashamed of themselves for being so: Dyer yearned to be an engineer, his real passion, and Abby is oppressed with the dull weariness of a woman’s lot. Their infant daughter died of diphtheria the year before, leaving them both numb with grief.