Locked in a hayloft with one night to decide, the women of an isolated religious colony argue over three choices: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave everything they have ever known.
What is Women Talking about?
"Women Talking" is almost entirely conversation, and that is its design. After a string of attacks by men inside their own colony comes to light, the women gather while the men are away and put the matter to a vote framed as three options. What follows is not a courtroom drama but a room full of mothers, daughters, and grandmothers working through faith, forgiveness, fear, and fury in real time, disagreeing with each other as much as with the world outside. The film keeps its focus tight on that single space and the hours ticking down before the men return, letting the debate itself carry the tension rather than any external threat. Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, and Jessie Buckley lead an ensemble that includes Ben Whishaw as the one man present, asked to record the women's words because none of them can read or write.
About the cast
Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, and Jessie Buckley form the emotional core of the debate, with Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy, Kate Hallett, and Michelle McLeod filling out the colony's generations of women. Ben Whishaw plays the schoolteacher tasked with taking minutes, the film's sole significant male presence, under Sarah Polley's direction.
Context & significance
Sarah Polley wrote and directed this 2022 drama, adapting Miriam Toews's novel of the same name, which was itself inspired by real attacks reported in a Mennonite community in Bolivia. The film deliberately keeps its setting unplaced in time, using plain dress and hand tools to universalize a story about women deciding, together, what justice and safety can look like when the systems around them offer neither.
Watching Women Talking on Ktime
K-Time carries "Women Talking" with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so the film's dense, overlapping dialogue comes through clearly for Farsi-speaking viewers. The page itself is free to read for anyone; watching the full film only requires logging into a K-Time account, on a platform built around the Farsi-speaking audience.