Watch Florence Pugh in the first trailer for ‘The Wonder’
The first trailer for The Wonder, starring Florence Pugh and directed by Sebastian Lelio, has been revealed. Pugh will star alongside Tom Burke, Niamh Algar, Toby Jones and Ciaran Hinds, amongst others, in a screen adaptation of the 2016 novel of the same name by Emma Donaghue.
Donaghue had received an Oscar nomination for the 2015 screenplay for Room, so the release of The Wonder has been highly anticipated. The film focuses on an English nurse (played by Pugh) who sets out for the Midlands of Ireland for a job taking care of an 11-year-old girl who has been unwell for some time, although she has been seemingly surviving on some sort of spiritual intervention.
The nurse’s job is actually to determine whether the child is a saint or a fraud. When the young girl’s health begins to wane, the nurse (named Lib) and a journalist (played by Tom Burke) decide to intervene and help her. However, this only enrages her family and the Church of the town in which the film is set.
Emma Donaghue recently told Vogue about the story: “About three decades ago now, I read about a Welsh girl who died as a result of fasting in the middle of the 19th century,” she said. “Rather than an isolated story, it turned out to be a phenomenon. What struck me most about that first instance is that nurses had actually been hired to watch this child. I thought it must have been the most bizarre situation as a medical professional: watching someone needlessly suffering and being prevented from doing anything about it.”
She added, “The media, too, reported on the case day to day – and yet no one saved this girl. I just thought, how could a group of adults have failed a child in this way? I decided to write a fictionalised account set in Ireland, with a nurse and a journalist at the heart of the story. It felt like a natural way to ask some probing questions. What does a nurse owe to a patient? What does a journalist owe to a subject?”
Check out the first trailer for the film below.
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