Both are victims of male violence, but they often turn their rage on each other. Salome (Claire Foy) and Mariche (Jessie Buckley), two mothers of young children, provide antiphonal chords of anger. The calmest and most measured, but also in some ways the most passionate and principled, belongs to Ona (Rooney Mara), who is pregnant. Many of the participants favor exit, but “Women Talking,” as its title suggests, is mostly voice - a weave of voices in varying arrangements of harmony and dissonance. The first option having been soundly rejected, they settle in to debate the other two, arguing the relative merits of exit and voice. The women of the community have already voted in a referendum offering three choices: do nothing - forgive, forget and hope for the best stay and fight or leave. While most of the men are away, bailing the accused perpetrators out of jail, a group of women meets in a hayloft to hash out a course of action.

Though many of them can recite the Bible from memory, they haven’t been taught to read and write. That vagueness reflects both the universality of the story’s themes and what the women know of the secular world, which is very little. Toews’s book was suggested by actual events that took place from 2005 to 2009 at a Mennonite colony in Bolivia, but the film version doesn’t specify a location. An outsider’s pickup truck blasting the Monkees’ “ Daydream Believer” is one of a handful of signs that this movie, directed by Sarah Polley from a novel by Miriam Toews, takes place anywhere near the present. The women are members of an agrarian religious community that has kept its distance from modernity. The grace and discipline of those activities, and the creativity they express, are woven into the film itself, which seems plain-spoken almost to the point of artlessness and turns out to be as layered and whorled as a hand-woven tapestry. Every so often, “Women Talking” lets its attention wander away from its main concern (which is, as you might have guessed, women talking) to observe the hands of girls as they draw pictures, play complicated clapping and string-figure games or braid one another’s hair into intricate plaits.

Women talking the novel