The World to Come

Synopsis

In the nineteenth-century American Northeast, Abigail lives with grief and the demands of life as a farmer’s wife. Her husband Dyer has withdrawn into himself, leaving her with an emotional isolation that the routines of work cannot relieve. The arrival of a new neighbour, Tallie, brings a different energy into Abigail’s world. Tallie also feels constrained, struggling against her husband Finney’s possessiveness. As the women spend time together, friendship develops into an intimacy that gives each something she had scarcely known how to ask for. Their attachment exists within marriages and a social order that offer little room for it. The film follows their discovery of tenderness and possibility against the pressures that shape their daily lives.