The World to Come

MOVIE #1,235 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 11.14.23 The TWO FOR TUESDAY “WORLD” MONTH gimmick rolls along with two more movies that have “world” in the title. I didn’t like this film but I want to write about it without sounding like a privileged chauvinist. What it boils down to, I believe, is that the period piece forbidden romance subgenre doesn't really work on a basic storytelling level, especially when it leans into the melodramatic side of things. There's a built-in expiration date. It's not as if these two are gonna run off and live happily ever after. The ending can only be bleak and tragic, or at best melancholy (they opt for the former here). But despite all these bigger picture qualms, the film is lacking on a more base level as well: Casey Affleck feels like he's sleepwalking through the role and Katherine Waterston's near constant narration in the form of diary entries gets tiresome fast.

I understand that this is catnip for a very particular audience and I think that's fine. Representation is important and romantic stories outside of the heteronormative deserve to be told. They tried to mix things up here to some degree (showing the sex scenes only as flashbacks towards the very end) but it still feels like a movie that’s been made a dozen or more times before.

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,234 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,236 ⫸

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The World to Come is a 2020 American drama film directed by Mona Fastvold, from a screenplay by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard, based upon Shepard's story of the same name. It stars Katherine Waterston, Vanessa Kirby, Christopher Abbott and Casey Affleck, and follows two neighboring couples battling hardship and isolation in mid-19th century America. It was released on September 6, 2020.