The World to Come – "I hold our friendship and study it"

January 1, 1856. Black and white pictures of a winter forest, bare trees, creaks, cawing crows. It's awfully cold in the house, so cold that the potatoes freeze immediately after they have been washed. In such deplorable conditions, the migrant farmers Abigail (Katherine Waterston) and Dyer (Casey Afflec) enter the new year. Having created a family not for love, husband and wife have become even more distant from each other after the death of their only daughter. They just fulfill their duties day by day.

In order to somehow resist her monochromatic gray life, Abigail keeps a diary in which she writes down everything that happens, all these sad and happy events, so contradictions are born between the outer and inner life of the heroine. It seems that the director Mona Fastvold created this epistolary film living in one notebook, due to the fact that it all consists of these memories recorded one after another.

Now, the romantic Abigail feels completely lost after the death of her daughter. "I have become my grief", she writes. The circumstances around her are not better. But this winter is rapidly changing with the arrival of the "spring" woman Tally (Vanessa Kirby) who has begun renting a neighborhood farm with her terribly jealous husband Finney (Christopher Abbott).

As the time passes, the women start spending more and more time with each other. Tally comes to Abigail and helps her with her routine, which makes Finney mad. Their friendship grows stronger, their feelings develop more rapidly and pour out into tender and sensual love. Despite the fact that there are almost no intimate scenes of same-sex love in the frame, when they appear, the breath stops and the heartbeat increases. So the story, that now begins with cold, darkness and the absence of hope, turns into a harsh hypothetical love story from which it's impossible to tear yourself away.

Nevertheless, all the characters are as restrained as possible and the tension that exists between Abigail and Tally the viewer can only guess. The women, in principle, appear on the screen together extremely rarely. But this is the highlight of the movie – it touches a raw nerve not by external factors of what is happening, but by internal mood and excitement.

It's worth saying that, in addition to the gripping plot of the film, the movie amazes with its smooth editing, panoramic vistas and attention to details, such as well-thought-out farm interior, utterly charming Tally's dresses and Dyer's rough hands always soiled in something black. All these together reflect the spirit of America of the XIX century.