The world that the Norwegian actress, author and filmmaker Mona Fastvold introduces us to in her second film as a director is not an idyllic one. Through diary entries, we immerse ourselves in the life of Abigail, who in her notes reflects on everyday life on the farm that she and her husband Dyer run in the American province around 1850. As a couple, they live together but each for themselves, united only by a deep mourning for which they cannot find common words. But at least for Abigail the darkness soon seems to lift when Tallie moves into her life. The more regularly the women meet, the closer they become, until they end up falling in love.
The World to Come pulls us into this forbidden shared destiny, which lives entirely through glances, hints and tender contact, and which nonetheless bears within it a great passion. Based on the short story of the same name by Jim Shepard, Fastvold stages the love story like a fragile composition: with haunting images and emotions that are mirrored in the radiant eyes of the female protagonists, as well as in the seasons that accompany their growing affection, until the raw landscape is once again hit by a disaster that craves its victims.
