Polley yields the lens to the female perspective, and Autje’s words that echo over the footage have the poetry of foresight. August is still present, played by Ben Whishaw, but his perspective is more limited. Polley’s conceit is that Autje is telling the story of the meeting to the unborn child of Ona, played by Rooney Mara. She is even less interested than Toews in explaining the particularities of the Mennonites, and gets rid of August as a narrator, yielding the voiceover to Autje (first-time actor Kate Hallett), one of the younger members of those gathered, who has also been violated. The screen adaptation of Women Talking hews incredibly closely to the book, but Polley makes some key changes. He went to university, but returned following an incident which resulted in his arrest-abused in prison, he slunk back to the confines of the community where he was born. Because none of the female members of this community speak English or have been taught to read or write, they enlist the help of one man, August, a schoolteacher whose family had been exiled for his own mother’s curiosity and desire for knowledge.

Toews’ conceit is that her text is the minutes of the meeting in which the women of the fictionalized Molotschna Colony decide whether they are going to leave the only home they have ever known, stay and fight, or do nothing.

It’s an austere novel that lets its lyricism emerge in quiet ways. Women Talking, her 7th novel, uses the horrific rapes as the basis for an explanation of how women speak when they are living in a place that denies them that right. Toews was raised Mennonite in Manitoba, Canada, and has written multiple books about her background. Novelist Miriam Toews possesses a unique insight into the survivors’ lives. Sign up for More to the Story, TIME’s weekly entertainment newsletter, to get the context you need for the pop culture you love The novel It was a distressing dispatch from an enclave beyond most outsiders’ understanding, where the language used is Low German, a vestige of the 16th Century. It would have been awful no matter where it occurred, but the fact that it happened in this place-where residents have cut themselves off from modern society all while ostensibly ascribing to pacifism, made the case even stranger.

Women talking the novel