The World to Come

2020 Directed by Mona Fastvold

Two women who forge a close connection despite their isolation in the mid-19th-century American frontier.

Katherine Waterston Casey Affleck Vanessa Kirby Christopher Abbott Kim Ciobanu Daniel Blumberg Andreea Vasile James Longshore

Alternative Title

未来世界

romance drama

105 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by Lucy ★★★ 1

SUNDANCE 2021: film #33
“there is something going on between us that i cannot unravel”
oh lord. this is poetic in a way but also reads like a horror movie. the chemistry between katherine and vanessa is real but it rarely gets a chance to shine, most of the narrative focuses on how sad and mundane daily life is and what a bummer it is that their lame husbands drag them down. it is what it is but just doesn’t work for me as a complete story, and with an ending just as bleak it might have made me cry but i also felt no desire to ever watch this in full again. i’m a little tired of sorrow
Review by AmandaTheJedi ★★★ 1

I just want Vanessa Kirby to talk to me in her American accent
Review by iana ★★★★ 1

everything about this is just divine! so beautifully restrained and yet i felt everything. loved katherine waterston’s very extra metaphors and christopher abbott doing nothing but looking hot. daniel blumberg’s score will inevitably make an appearance on my spotify wrapped. astonishment! and! joy!
Review by ☆ Sophie ☆ ★★★½ 16

did I rewatch this only for Vanessa Kirby?
maybe
Review by davidehrlich ★★★★ 2

As coldly drawn as an atlas yet no less capable of enflaming the imagination, Mona Fastvold’s “The World to Come” is a hard and brittle period love story that thaws into something much warmer — what its hyper-literate heroine would call “astonishment and joy” — as a merciless 19th century winter blushes into a most unexpected spring. Tuesday, January 1st, 1856. Abigail (Katherine Waterston) mourns the daughter who was taken by diphtheria a few months prior, and journals about a world that feels barren in the young girl’s absence. “This morning, ice in our bedroom for the first time all winter,” she reads aloud in voiceover, offering the first excerpt from an interior monologue so pronounced that Fastvold’s romance often…
Review by laura ★★★½

every line spoken by vanessa & katherine sounds so poetic and then it comes time for christopher abbott to read one of their letters and he sounds like the boy from your english class that was half asleep and the teacher called on him to read aloud the next page of a book. i mean this as a compliment. it was a choice and i respect it.
vanessa kirby’s jaw acting!!!!!!!
Review by Frances Meh ★★★★

Why yes, in fact, I can see how Vanessa Kirby moving in next door might distract one from one’s marital obligations.

~ Sundance #7 ~
Review by justmiaslife ★★★★

this is everything "ammonite" tried to be and failed at...love vanessa kirby and i love this cinematography even more!
Review by deah ★★

the way the whole theatre (of lesbians) recoiled when the words "produced by casey affleck" came up on screen
Review by 𝔡𝔞𝔯𝔠𝔶 ★★★★★

pioneer lesbians be like, "you smell like biscuit"
Review by George Clark ★★★ 4

Directed by Norwegian director Mona Fastvold and set somewhere along the mid-19th century American East Coast frontier, “The World to Come” captures the life of two married neighbours as they battle hardship and isolation, while a bond between the two women begins to form, challenging them both physically and psychologically.
In the last few years, sapphic period dramas have become more common. With the release of 2019’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” and 2020’s "Ammonite", the first being an utter masterpiece and the latter being highly disappointing, “The World to Come” looked set to be another hit for the genre. Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby are beautiful together, crafting a rough-country love story, that kept me intrigued as the…
Review by Nakul ★★★½

Made with delicacy and well crafted in every respect, Mona Fastvold's The World to Come is a lyrical, moving and equally bleak & warm frontier period drama with a richly textured atmosphere and a finely detailed sense of late 18th-century life. It's less a story about love than it is about loneliness. Katherine Waterson’s voice-over was so soothing & pervasive and the narrative rely heavily on it to convey her emotional interiority. Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby are both magnetic with strong supporting performances by Casey Affleck and Christopher Abbott. The use of film stock & natural light/setting and that haunting score by Daniel Blumberg creates such a sense of place & time and adds to it's feel a lot.
Tho I can see how the pacing might be frustrating to some. It's screenplay co-written by Ron Hansen, of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford".

Recent reviews

Review by Johnny Yu-cheng Hung ★★

我不相信酷兒獅了，每次期待總是失落，傷透我的心
Review by Ruby🌈 ★★★ 5

Vanessa Kirby好美，我願為她梳理長髮。
這部片在我的同溫層都是負評，所以我已經有心理準備，看完感覺與其說是生氣不如說是困惑，這個文本我想是真的蠻美的，但如果覺得不做成朗讀劇觀眾看不懂的話，真的是不用硬拍成電影吧⋯⋯？（我並不特別覺得後面牢騷很煩，只是自溺自憐這種情緒在銀幕上本來就不討喜）
電影最惹惱我的問題是，Abigail本來的生活了無生氣，應該很大原因和她和丈夫無法多做文學、智識上的交流有關，而Tallie的出現帶來改變。但她們之間究竟聊了什麼我看完電影還是不知道？她們什麼都可以聊吧，談詩、談身邊的女人、甚至談縫紉或烘焙也不是不行，但電影裡啥都沒有，最多篇幅竟然是在聊各自的老公。一起抱怨生活可能讓人變朋友，但成為愛人還不太夠，更別提兩個女人各自的內心世界在哪裡了。
但配樂完全成為我的軟肋，極愛這種slowcore基底加上低限的質地，單簧管像是在吟詠，讓我想起冷天裡的火爐。反覆出現的theme也的確很有女主角一直絮絮叨叨的風格。幾次重聽專輯依然喜歡不已。
EDIT: 讀完Orange大的影評，對比原著之後可以看出許多精巧的電影化的處理。只能說刻意挑戰一種現代觀眾視為禁忌的旁白方式，效果真的見仁見智了⋯⋯
www.orange-review.com/2021/03/the-world-to-come.html
Review by whitelilies3 ★★

山瀛：黑嘻嘻啥都看不见
10 minutes later....
山瀛：一片白啥也都看不见 😂
Review by VijayIsMyLife ★★★★

The seasons are a time marker of sorts for this 19th-century love story between neighboring pioneer wives played by Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby. The film begins in 1856, through the highly intellectual, narrated thoughts of Waterston’s Abigail, an upstate New York farm wife who with her husband Dyer (Casey Affleck) is looking for a way back to meaningfulness after the tragic death of their young daughter.
The film is deeply intimate in its design, its physical spaces appropriately impeding, its interior monologue wounded and murmured. Abigail, narrates much of the film, reading from her diary with the dream-like melancholy of Emily Dickinson. In these pages, she is better able to open up about her anguish, her deep loneliness, and…
Review by Lua Lima ★½

chato e desagradável
Review by rayssa

it’s a good thing that we remember that our imaginations can always be cultivated.
(rebeca, my city of joy. 🤍)
Review by luxcoppola ★★★★

Lesbian Vanessa Kirby 💖🌈💘
Review by theariana

I'm looking at vanessa kirby VERY respectfully,,,
Review by Lamees ★★

Very long story short, she lost it
Review by sleigher

amazon
Review by Michael ★★★★

17 de Abril
Review by lucywu ★★★

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

日記格式，以詩意且充滿文采的主角VO與對白貫串故事，形塑出主角的角色魅力，加上Katherine Waterson的出色演出，還算可以忽視一些劇情上的缺點。
---防雷---
*配樂使用低音豎笛作為主要樂器，相當特別且獨具魅力。
*音效設計與配樂互相搭配，時有大膽的運用，富有巧思。
*攝影蠻不錯的，角色與環境的關係以及空間的運用都頗有巧思，以及用底片拍就是讚。
*美術設計、場景與服裝也都相當用心。
*對於主角Abigail與丈夫Dyer的經濟困境在故事的最初極力描寫，是好的手段。但在後半段的故事這個部分便疏於延續，例如在要去尋找Tallie的時候，突然就有了馬車、Abigail買了兩塊半的衣服，丈夫Dyer卻沒有發現⋯⋯（想買地圖的時候就超反對⋯⋯）也許隨著季節變暖，物資有變得豐腴使得經濟困境被解決？並非故事主軸所以僅作吐槽。
*雖然沒有期待床戲但是Abigail躺在死去的Tallie身旁時，用蒙太奇呈現床戲的方式有點硬要提起情緒還不如不要在那裡剪進去ㄟ我沒有一定要看。