After making a heralded debut at last year’s Venice Film Festival, Mona Fastvold’s lesbian romance The World to Come finally hits our shores. The film, which stars Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby as lovers on the American frontier, will be one of the biggest projects to hit Sundance later this month.
Set in the mid-19th century somewhere on the American east coast frontier, the story follows the stolen romance between two married women amid the unforgiving landscape and brutal elements. Casey Affleck and Christopher Abbott co-star as the women’s husbands. The film is based on a story by Jim Shephard, which he adapted along with Ron Hansen, author of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, made into a movie that starred Affleck.
Following its world premiere at Venice, The World to Come was showered with accolades including the festival’s Queer Lion award. Just based on the footage in this trailer it’s a gorgeously-crafted period love story that could spark passions in a way that Ammonite didn’t earlier this year.
This marks Fastvold’s first feature since 2014’s Sundance hit, The Sleepwalker, which starred Abbott and her partner Brady Corbet. She also co-wrote the screenplays for Vox Lux and The Childhood of a Leader. Lots of interconnecting threads here.
The World to Come opens in theaters on February 12th before going digital on March 2nd.
In this powerful 19th century romance set in the American Northeast, Abigail (Katherine Waterston), a farmer’s wife, and her new neighbor Tallie (Vanessa Kirby) find themselves irrevocably drawn to each other. A grieving Abigail tends to her withdrawn husband Dyer (Casey Affleck) as free-spirit Tallie bristles at the jealous control of her husband Finney (Christopher Abbott), when together their intimacy begins to fill a void in each other’s lives they never knew existed. Directed by Mona Fastvold and scripted by Jim Shepard and Ron Hansen, THE WORLD TO COME explores how isolation is overcome by the intensity of human connection.
