‘The World to Come’ movie review: Not as evocative as ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ and that could well be its strength

Norweigian filmmaker Mona Fastvold’s doomed love affair is soft, gentle and plays out like an audio-visual book of a person rummaging through memories and the sadness that comes with it

Apologies if the headline sounds misleading or comes across belittling Mona Fastvold’s ambitious efforts to remain grounded and faithful to the original source material, based on Jim Shepard’s novel of the same name. A screenplay by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard, The World to Come bears no semblance to its French counterpart, Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, except that both are period pieces centred around a doomed love affair and are shouldered by two female characters rubbing off heat that could turn into a wildfire, as they quietly peer into each other’s eyes taking comfort in their existence. It is actually silly to even mention Fastvold’s film with Portrait… in the same breath, although it is true that the primary characters of two films are distant cousins with a common heart, for, The World to Come might be a good companion piece to Portrait... If such a parallel were to be drawn, the ideal title to The World to Come would be: Portrait of Two Ladies Sharing Heat, in the winter of 1856 in Schoharie County, where they become acquainted as neighbours. Let us cut to the chase: there has never been a more recent great example of a film adaptation, whose literary weight casts a looming presence in everyday conversations, exhibiting the characters to communicate in strong literary verses, in a non-flowery garb without making the narration sound like a cesspool of pretence. There is a thin line that separates dialogues from natural conversations, but there is something austere about Fastvold’s idea of day-to-day conversations that can hardly be classified as “dialogues”. It is another thing that The World to Come looks like it was meant to be bathed in a rich piece of literature.