The two women are to take turns watching Anna and report on their findings. Lib soon learns that she’s not the only nurse they’ve engaged, though the other is no medical expert she’s a nun.

“The Wonder” doesn’t emphasize this overly, though you can sense it in Lib’s frustration when her employers call her away from whatever gruel was to be her first meal at the boardinghouse where she’s staying (a place with nearly a dozen hungry mouths to feed). Just a few years earlier, the Irish Potato Famine pummeled the region, starving roughly a million, and food is still precious in most people’s minds. Once Lib arrives in Ireland, the movie commits to her reality. It’s not clear what the film gains from this self-conscious setup, especially since Lelio proceeds to give his mostly female cast sufficient room to make their characters feel true. “We invite you to believe in this one,” continues the narrator, as DP Ari Wegner (“Lady Macbeth”) tracks left from a farmhouse set to the hold of a ship to find Pugh, deep in character. Movies aren’t real, this unusual introduction reminds, but their emotions can be. Then how to explain the film’s Brechtian framing device? Lelio opens on a soundstage, drawing our attention to the artifice: “Hello, this is a movie called ‘The Wonder,’” a woman welcomes (supporting actor Niamh Algar, so compelling in tiny doses, you wish she had more to do here). The book was published within the past decade but makes every effort to evoke its mid-19th-century milieu, as does Lelio, who pushes the coarse handmade costumes, dreary candlelit interiors and mud-mired Midland locations so heavily that you way well forget you’re streaming this Netflix original on an iPad. With “The Wonder,” Sebastián Lelio, the gifted Chilean director responsible for “Gloria” and its English-language remake, “Gloria Bell” (as well as 2018 Oscar winner “A Fantastic Woman”), has delivered an evenhanded but ultimately preposterous adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel, co-written by the author herself (with an assist from Alice Birch). In any case, the movie works better if it’s one person’s faith against another’s.) Lib insists on logic, which means some kind of trickery must be involved, whereas the town doctor (Toby Jones) and his all-male council (including the area priest, played by Ciarán Hinds) believe in divine intervention. (Technically, there is, crass as it may sound: Instead of focusing on what goes in to Anna’s mouth, she might easily put the matter to rest by examining what, if anything, comes out the other end. She’s confident that Anna couldn’t be this healthy without eating on the sly, but there’s no way to prove it. An outwardly stoic but inwardly bluesy soul who may herself be in need of saving, Lib is a modern-minded woman of science.

The wonder emma donoghue review