Her act of starvation seems to satisfy her family that participates with her in this grim story of severe mercy. They call her choice holy. But we are unsure what they would call their participation. Perhaps, atonement?
There are also other participants in Anna's continuing persistence of penance for the dead. Her church believes she is a miracle as her contrition has lasted several months without consequence. Even Anna's village believes God is at work in her little life as it prays daily for her soul and visits frequently.
Then there is a medical-health committee of sorts which daily gathers to observe her condition through a visiting village doctor and to the words of the church's appointed nun. A physician records her health. A priest listens to her prayers. The nun stays at Anna's bedside. Neighbors whisper with reverence. And local pilgrims travel miles hoping to witness the extraordinary.
Only one person asks the obvious question.
"What if everyone is wrong?"
That question lies at the heart of The Wonder (2022), starring actress Florence Pugh. At first glance the film appears to be a historical mystery set in post-famine Ireland. Yet as the story unfolds, it becomes something far more unsettling. It asks how ordinary, decent, religious people can participate in extraordinary cruelty while believing they are doing what is right.
The tragedy is not that one child believes a destructive story.
The tragedy is that every adult around her believes it first.
Into this story the film watcher is asked what brought all these participants into Anna's story and why? Why does Anna chose to starve herself? Why does her family allow it? Why does their church and community revere it? These are the questions we are to learn throughout the length of the film.
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Because of these questions the film moves beyond historical drama and into something resembling a modern day parable. It is no longer simply a story about nineteenth-century Ireland. It is about every family, every church, every ideology, and every community that becomes so committed to its own narrative that it can no longer recognize the suffering standing before its eyes.
History repeatedly reminds us that this is not an isolated phenomenon. Human beings have justified child abuse, slavery, persecution, war, racial and cultural oppression, discrimination, and countless other heartless injustices through distorted stories promising righteousness while producing cruelty and suffering. The particulars differ. The pattern remains remarkably familiar.
Throughout history, the stories we either tell ourselves - or grow up within - become indispensable to our lives, our families, our churches, communities, and nation. They preserve memory, transmit values, cultivate identity, and inspire hope. Without them, civilizations could scarcely exist.
Yet stories possess another, more dangerous power. They can become closed worlds. They can become prisons. They can become realities more compelling than reality itself. When that happens, compassion slowly yields to partial truths that harden into unquestioned beliefs. Resulting questions become threats. Doubt becomes betrayal. And the protection of the story lived within becomes more important than the protection of children, adults, the disabled, the unwanted.
The Wonder is not, therefore, simply a film about religious extremism.
It is a film about ourselves. Our myths and narratives we live within.
And it is a difficult film to watch when one recognizes the agony writhing beneath the innocence surrounding a nine-year-old child helplessly trapped within webs of accusation, judgment, and self-righteousness.
This agony is not limited to one cottage, one village, or one century. It can emerge anywhere - from a simple farming community to an urban neighborhood, from isolated villages to religious sects and ideological movements, wherever inherited stories, cultural traditions, and survival instincts become more powerful than compassion itself.
The Child Who Bears the Sins of Others
Anna O'Donnell is nine years old.
She is not starving because food is unavailable. She is not refusing nourishment because she wishes to die. She fasts because she believes her suffering serves a higher purpose beyond herself. In her young understanding of the world, she has taken upon herself a burden that does not belong to her: the spiritual fate of her deceased brother.
Anna believes she is saving him from the torments of purgatory.
To those around her, this is not simply a child refusing food. It is an act of devotion. Her hunger becomes a sign of faithfulness. Her weakness becomes evidence of spiritual strength. Her suffering becomes a sacrifice offered out of love.
Yet beneath this extraordinary belief lies a heartbreaking reality: a child has accepted responsibility for the actions, choices, and consequences of another person.
Anna is carrying a burden created before she was old enough to understand it.
This is what makes her story so painful. Children do not create the worlds into which they are born. They inherit the beliefs, fears, hopes, expectations, and wounds of those who raise them. They learn what love means, what duty requires, what guilt feels like, and what sacrifice looks like from the people around them.
For Anna, love has become inseparable from suffering. Duty has become inseparable from self-denial. And salvation has become inseparable from her own disappearance. The question surrounding Anna is not simply why she chooses to fast. The deeper question is how a child came to believe that love requires her to suffer.
A Village Waiting for a Miracle
Anna's suffering does not occur in isolation. Around her gathers an entire community trying to understand what it is witnessing.
A small village in post-famine Ireland becomes captivated by the possibility that something extraordinary is taking place within the walls of a modest cottage. Word spreads that a young girl has survived for months without eating. What begins as concern slowly becomes fascination. What appears medically impossible begins to take on religious meaning.
Anna is no longer simply a child.
She becomes a symbol.
A village doctor is asked to observe her physical condition. A committee gathers to determine whether the reports surrounding her are credible. The church sends a nun to remain at Anna's bedside and witness her daily condition. A priest listens to her prayers and offers spiritual guidance. Neighbors visit with reverence. Outsiders travel to see the girl whose fasting has become a source of wonder.
Each person arrives with their own understanding of what they are seeing.
Some see devotion.
Some see mystery.
Some see a miracle.
Some see a test of faith.
The community does not gather around Anna because they do not care about her. In many ways, the opposite appears true. They are deeply concerned with her. They pray for her. They watch over her. They seek to understand her.
And yet the film slowly reveals a troubling tension. A community can surround someone with attention while still failing to truly see them. Anna is constantly observed, but the question remains whether she is truly understood.
The village has become a witness to something it cannot explain. But as the days pass, another question begins to emerge: When a community believes it is witnessing something sacred, how difficult does it become to question the story forming around it?
Anna's fasting is not viewed by those around her as a tragedy.
It is viewed as a testimony.
Within the religious imagination of the village, suffering carries meaning. Sacrifice has always occupied an important place within Christian tradition. Self-denial, repentance, and acts of devotion have long been understood as expressions of faith. Anna's family and neighbors do not see her suffering as meaningless. They see purpose within it.
This is precisely what makes her situation so difficult to comprehend. Anna is not merely refusing food. She is offering something. Her hunger becomes a prayer. Her weakness becomes a witness. Her endurance becomes a sign of spiritual devotion.
The community does not gather around a child they believe is simply wasting away.
They gather around a child they believe has discovered something sacred.
The language surrounding Anna reflects this understanding. She is not described merely as sick. She is viewed as extraordinary. Her suffering is interpreted through the larger stories of sin, forgiveness, sacrifice, and redemption that have shaped the religious life of the community.
Yet the film quietly asks what happens when a sacred story becomes separated from compassion.
What happens when suffering itself becomes evidence of righteousness?
What happens when the endurance of pain becomes more important than the relief of suffering?
The Wonder does not dismiss the human desire to find meaning in suffering. That desire is deeply woven into the human experience. Throughout history, people have searched for purpose amid grief, loss, injustice, and death.
But the film presents a troubling tension. Meaning can comfort. Meaning can sustain. Meaning can also become a burden when it demands that suffering continue. Anna's tragedy is not that she seeks meaning. Her tragedy is that the only meaning available to her requires her disappearance. Her passing. Her death.
When a London nurse, Lib Wright (Florence Pugh) arrives in the backwater village, she is not welcomed as someone who will uncover a miracle. She is invited as someone who will observe one.
A trained English nurse with experience caring for wounded soldiers, Lib is assigned to watch Anna and determine whether the reports surrounding her extraordinary fast can be explained. She is not there to comfort, rescue, or judge. She is there to witness.
But witnessing proves more complicated than anyone expects.
Lib enters a community that already has an answer. Anna is a miracle. Her fasting is a sign. Her suffering has meaning. The village story is built upon familiar religious themes: sin, sacrifice, redemption, and divine mystery. Within that story, Anna's actions are not irrational. They are understandable. She is a child offering herself for someone she loves.
But Lib sees something different. She sees a child whose body is failing. She sees hunger. She sees suffering. She sees a young girl carrying a burden no child should bear.
Where the village asks, "What does this mean?"
Lib first asks, "What is happening?"
The difference between these questions becomes the central tension of the film.
One story searches for the extraordinary.
The other searches for the human being within the extraordinary.
Yet The Wonder does not present this conflict as a simple battle between faith and science. The film's tension is more complicated than that. Lib carries her own wounds, grief, and assumptions. She is not an outside observer untouched by suffering. She arrives carrying memories of her own losses.
Everyone in the story is interpreting reality through a story they already possess. The villagers have their story of miracle. Lib has her story of survival. Anna has her story of sacrifice. The question is not merely which story will win. The deeper question is whether any story can remain.
Lib Wright arrives in the village as an outsider. She is English. She is Protestant. She is a trained nurse entering a deeply Catholic Irish community still carrying the wounds of famine, poverty, and historical distrust. Before she ever meets Anna, Lib is already crossing boundaries of culture, religion, and memory.
Yet her assignment is simple. She is not there to intervene. She is there to watch.
The committee overseeing Anna's condition does not ask Lib to rescue the child. It asks her to observe the child. She is one more set of eyes among many - a witness whose role is to record what happens and determine whether anything unusual is occurring spiritually or as divine sustenance of starving body and soul.
But observation is never as neutral as it appears. To watch another person suffer is already a moral encounter. As the days pass, Lib finds herself caught between the role she has been given and the responsibility she begins to feel. The longer she sits with Anna, the harder it becomes to see her as a religious symbol or a medical curiosity. She sees a child.
A child who is suffering. A frightened child. A lonely child. A child whose entire identity has become wrapped around personal sacrifice for another. For a brother who is departed and believed living in purgatory for sins he committed.
Lib's professional training tells her to question what she sees and what she is told. But her human compassion tells her something more. That Anna needs help.
Yet Lib herself also carries her own hidden suffering. Beneath her calm, practical exterior is a woman racked with grief and loss which is on display nightly. Her journey to Ireland is not only a professional assignment. It is also a deep encounter with grieving memories she has yet to face fully.
In this way, The Wonder presents two wounded lives meeting across different forms of suffering.
Anna carries the burden of a story she inherited.
Lib carries the burden of a loss she cannot release.
Neither woman is entering the village whole.
And perhaps that is why they are able to recognize something in one another that the village cannot yet see.
One of the most unsettling elements of The Wonder is that Anna's suffering does not occur in secret. Everyone knows. Everyone is watching and wondering. And everyone has a reason for being part of Anna's story.
The village doctor observes her physical condition. The priest attends to her spiritual life. The nun remains beside her bed. The committee gathers reports. The villagers pray, visit, and wait for miracle to occur. Curious outsiders travel to visit Anna to witness what they believe may be something extraordinary.
No one person creates Anna's suffering.
Which is precisely what makes the situation so difficult to observe.
The film presents a community in which ethical responsibility is owned by all the people within Anna's story. Though each person holds one piece of the story, they each also bear a personal role within it. Whether the community knows it or not, each person is contributing something necessary for Anna's story to continue.
The doctor brings medical observation.
The priest brings spiritual guidance.
The nun brings religious companionship.
The villagers bring faith and concern.
The committee brings order and oversight.
Yet, by surrounding a suffering person with attention does not always mean that person is truly being protected. A person can be watched and still remain unseen. This hidden, sociological tension, gives the film one of its most powerful questions:
What happens when witnessing becomes a substitute for acting?
The people surrounding Anna are not indifferent. They are deeply invested in her. They care about what happens to her. But their understanding of her suffering is shaped by the story they already believe.
For they are not merely observing Anna. They are observing Anna through a particular meaning. A particular faith and religious belief that has come to mean something different for each congregant before the communion table that is Anna.
Her hunger is not seen only as hunger. Her weakness is not seen only as weakness. Her suffering is interpreted through a larger narrative of faith, sacrifice, and redemption. To this, the film invites the viewer to consider the uncomfortable possibility that harm does not always arrive through cruelty or neglect.
Sometimes it arrives through devotion. Sometimes it arrives through waiting. Sometimes it arrives through the belief that someone else must know better and will intervene. And sometimes the hardest thing to do is not seeing what is happening. It is allowing ourselves to see it differently.
Anna's story is not the only story of suffering in The Wonder.
Beneath the village's fascination with a miracle lies a landscape already marked by hunger, grief, loss, and the convinced need for an atoning miracle that removes the stain born by child, family, church, village, and community at large.
Behind these events lies the memory of the Great Famine present in the lives of those who themselves have suffered its cruelty and hardships. Starvation was not merely a historical event. It was a torn and living memory carried by families who have experienced what hunger can take from them.
For Lib, suffering has another face.
She arrives in Ireland carrying a grief she has never fully released. Before she becomes the nurse watching over Anna, she is a woman mourning the loss of her own child. Her quiet dependence on the soul-numbing laudanum and her attachment to her child's small baby shoes preserves a broken person suspended between grievous memory and the inability to move forward as she is.
Lib, then, is surrounded by another kind of hunger.
Not the hunger of the body.
But the starved hunger of a broken heart separated from her child.
Like Anna, she is living inside a story shaped by loss. Anna believes she must sacrifice herself to save another. Lib has allowed her grief to preserve an undying connection to her lost child. Both women are held by memories they cannot yet release.
The film draws a subtle connection between them.
Anna is trapped by her story of personal loss and sacrifice.
Lib is trapped by her own story of personal loss and grief.
Both will discover that remembering does not require remaining imprisoned by the past.
And even more oddly, their stories of deliverance will require each of their own participations together in finding forgiveness and salvation.
This juxtapositional parallel gives The Wonder a deeply emotional dimension. The film is not only asking whether Anna will survive. It is also asking whether those around her can find their own way back into life. And into the further life of God's grace and care.
Healing, the film suggests, does not come through forgetting.
It comes through learning how to carry memory differently.
From the beginning of The Wonder, the harbor quietly waits in the background. It was part of Lib's story as she walked past the piers from the train to the stagecoach. And it was also where Lib would later return when arriving in a deeply transformation moment in her life.
The ports and harbors where places of crossing bearing uncertainty and transition. She has comes from another world outside the villages' experience, to enter into a rural community that is been profoundly shaped by its own history, wounds, and beliefs. The harbor then marks for Lib the boundary between what was known and what has yet to be discovered. It will later do the same for Anna.
For by the end of the film, that same harbor will carry a different meaning. It will no longer be a place of arrival. It will becomes a place of departure.
Once completed, the journey away from the village will represent more than mere physical movement away. For Anna, it will be leaving behind the only world she has ever known - a world where her identity had been defined by sacrifice, guilt, and obligation. And for Lib, she will be leaving behind her own resolved grief and the memories which had held her captive for too long.
But before that journey could begin, something had to end. Hence, the circumstances leading up Anna's home burning up becomes a very powerful image of death and resurrection for both Lib and Anna. Fire destroys. But fire also transforms.
Within the burning flames were the severe objects and spaces connected to needless suffering. There, in the fire, was the cottage where Anna's beliefs and identity were shaped, the crushed bottle of laudanum that helped Lib endure her grief, and the baby shoes tenderly placed on the burning bed which had preserved for too long the painful memory of a lost child to God.
The fire did not erase the past.
It released them from living entirely within an unhealthy, dark past.
What remained when leaving this past was not forgetfulness, but possibility.
Anna does not become someone new because her past disappears. Lib does not heal because her grief never existed. Their lives remain marked by what happened. But they are no longer defined only by what happened. The final journey suggests that sometimes transformation requires leaving a place that can no longer sustain life.
That new stories require new surroundings.
That new identities require new companions and relationships.
And that new beginnings require the courage to cross from an old world to a new one.
Throughout The Wonder, everyone and no one is searching for a miracle. The village believes it has found one. A young girl survives without food. A child demonstrates extraordinary devotion. A mystery unfolds that seems to reach beyond ordinary explanation. But as the story progresses, the meaning of a miracle becomes less certain.
What exactly is miraculous?
Is it Anna's ability to survive?
Is it a sign of divine intervention?
Is it the strength of human love?
Is it the courage to challenge a community's deepest assumptions?
Or is it something quieter and more human - the possibility that a life defined by suffering can become a life defined by hope?
The film does not provide a simple answer.
Instead, The Wonder leaves the viewer with competing understandings of what redemption might look like.
For the village, redemption is found in a child's sacrifice.
For Lib, redemption begins with protection and compassion.
For Anna, redemption ultimately requires the possibility of becoming someone beyond the personal-religious identity she had told herself to believe.
The film's greatest tension is not between belief and disbelief, faith and science, or religion and reason. It is between stories that preserve life and stories that consume it.
Why?
Because stories matter. They shape how people understand suffering. They shape how communities respond to vulnerability. They shape how individuals understand themselves. A story can offer meaning in the midst of pain. A story can also ask a person to surrender themselves to pain. Perhaps the enduring question of The Wonder is not whether a miracle occurred. Perhaps the question is what kind of miracle we are looking for.
A miracle that confirms what we already believe?
Or a miracle that allows us to see reality, and one another, more clearly?
The Wonder is a difficult film to watch because it does not give us an easy enemy. It gives us human beings. People who are shaped by history, faith, grief, love, fear, and the stories they have inherited.
It asks us to look not only at Anna's village, but at ourselves. By the kind of stories that shape our lives. Our churches and communities. Our friends and neighbors.
And when those stories no longer serve life -
do we have the courage to let them change?
To say "No," to them. And to let them go?
If The Wonder raised questions that stayed with you, these films explore many of the same themes from different perspectives.
- Women Talking - Abuse, silence, and moral courage within an isolated religious community.
- Philomena (film) and Philomena (biography)- Faith, institutional failure, memory, forgiveness, and reconciliation.
- Doubt - Certainty, ambiguity, authority, conscience, and institutional responsibility.
- The White Ribbon - Childhood, discipline, hidden violence, and the formation of authoritarian communities.
- Babette's Feast - A hopeful counterpoint exploring grace, generosity, hospitality, and transformation.
Further Reading
- RogerEbert.com – The Wonder review by Brian Tallerico. A perceptive discussion of empathy, moral responsibility, and Florence Pugh's nuanced performance. The Wonder review (RogerEbert.com)
- The Guardian – Review of Emma Donoghue's novel The Wonder. Explores the historical "fasting girls" tradition and the novel's psychological and religious tensions. The Wonder by Emma Donoghue review (The Guardian)
- Netflix Tudum – "An Inside Look at the Real Stories that Inspired The Wonder." Explains the nineteenth-century phenomenon of "fasting girls" and the historical inspiration behind the story. The real stories behind The Wonder (Netflix Tudum)
- The Atlantic – Stubborn, Determined, and Dying. Sophie Gilbert reflects on The Wonder as a story of faith, self-annihilation, and the cultural spectacle surrounding the "fasting girl." Stubborn, Determined, and Dying (The Atlantic)
- Script Magazine – Interview with director Sebastián Lelio discussing the film's moral dilemmas, the tension between faith and science, and adapting Emma Donoghue's novel. Conversation with Sebastián Lelio (Script Magazine)
- YouTube Interview – Emma Donoghue and Sebastián Lelio discuss adapting The Wonder, its themes, and the relationship between belief and observation. The Wonder's Writer and Director Discuss Faith, Science, and Storytelling
- The New Yorker – Emma Donoghue's Art of Starvation. A superb essay on the historical "fasting girls," the novel's origins, and the psychological and religious world that inspired The Wonder
Questions for Reflection
- What burden was Anna carrying that did not belong to her?
- At what point does compassion become separated from conviction?
- Can sincere people unintentionally participate in another person's suffering?
- When does a community become unable to question the stories that define it?
- Which character changed the most during the film—and why?
- What did Lib discover about herself while trying to save Anna?
- What, in the end, was the true miracle?
- Which story in the film stayed with you the longest?
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