‘The World to Come’ Review: A Lyrical Exploration of Female Desire in 19th-Century America
Guy Lodge Film CriticA shy, introverted farmer’s wife in Schoharie County, New York, Abigail has stopped going to church since the death of her young daughter Nellie. “I no longer derive comfort from the thought of a better world to come,” she says, in one of the many narrated diary entries that give Mona Fastvold’s period drama its literate, contemplative voice.The line provides “The World to Come” with its title, which reverberates and expands in meaning as the film’s simple, year-spanning story unfolds: At first Abigail may be speaking of the afterlife, though as an exhilarating new love is denied her by the ruling patriarchy, it seems she’s looking to a liberated world far ahead of her modest existence in 1856.