Is Netflix's "The Wonder" Based On a True Story?
Is Netflix's "The Wonder" a True Story?
Here's what we know about the events that inspired Florence Pugh's latest blockbuster.
BY SAMANTHA OLSON
PUBLISHED: NOV 23, 2022
Florence Pugh stans know that she brings magic to any project she's involved in (see: Don't Worry Darling and her upcoming flick, Dune 2). Over the years, the 26-year-old actress has brought a fresh perspective to the psychological thriller genre, and her latest movie, The Wonder, is no exception.
The Netflix film is set in 1862, 13 years after the real-life Great Famine in Ireland. Florence plays an English Nightingale Nurse named Lib Wright, who is called by a religious community to conduct a 2-week-long examination of an 11-year-old girl who hasn't eaten in four months. Without food, the patient claims she miraculously survives off of "manna from heaven," and as her health is put at risk, Nurse Lib plans to uncover the truth behind the young girl's illness — even if it means challenging the faith of the Catholic church.
The Wonder begins with a message that reads "The people you are about to meet, the characters, believe in their stories with complete devotion." This may not explicitly say it's "based on a true story," but the message is definitely enough to get viewers curious about the movie's plot and whether it has any historical accuracy.
So, is Netflix's The Wonder based on a true story? Here's what we know.
Is The Wonder based on a true story?
Netflix's latest flick is actually based on the novel of the same name by Emma Donoghue, which is loosely inspired by The Great Famine of Ireland (otherwise known as The Great Hunger) that happened in real life from 1845 to 1852.
According to U.K. Parliament, The Great Famine caused the country of Ireland to suffer "a period of starvation, disease, and emigration" because of a disease that affected the growth of potatoes. Parliament also reports that during the time, one-third of Ireland's population depended on potatoes for food, which resulted in most people starving and nearly 1 million lives lost.
While the characters of The Wonder aren't real people, the young patient, Anna, is based on the real concept of "fasting girls" during the Victorian era. Per The Daily Mail, fasting girls were "young women around the world [who] claimed to survive without any food or water." While some found fasting to be a religious gift, others believed it was linked to psychic powers. Ultimately, neither of these theories was proven to be true.
Author Emma Donoghue said that she learned about the fasting girls while conducting research for The Wonder and decided to include the 1800s phenomenon in her novel.
"When I came across these real fasting girl cases from the 16th century to the 20th, I thought, 'That's the freakiest thing' and then I thought, 'No, it's quite likely to be heard, isn't it?' It's quite like girls being terrified to become girls in a culture that sees them as sex objects," she told Newsweek before explaining that the past continuously stays connected to the present day. "I always found historical stories are totally connected to today, because of course, the questions you bring to them are the questions that the writer living in 2022 has."
Who is fasting girl Sarah Jacob?
Part of Donoghue's research included the case of Sarah Jacob, who became famous as the Welsh Fasting Girl. The Daily Mail reports that in the 1860s — nearly a decade after the Great Famine — Sarah fell ill at the age of nine and was instructed to take bed rest. She claimed that she never drank or ate any food, which caused people from across Britain to travel to her "tiny village" in Carmarthenshire to pay a fee and see Sarah in real life. We see similar events unravel in The Wonder when Anna's parents charge strangers to enter their home to see their daughter.
Suspicions around Sarah's habits grew, so a doctor from Guy's Hospital arranged for Sarah's claims to be tested. There were theories that one of Sarah's sisters had been sneaking her food or that she was eating and drinking in the middle of the night. Like Nurse Lib in The Watcher, there were six nurses who took different shifts to keep an eye on Sarah. Per New York University's Langone Health database, Sarah's experiment lasted for five days, as she starved to death on the nurses' watch.
Per the 1870 report of Sarah Jacob's trial, her parents were convicted of manslaughter for the negligence of their daughter. However, the doctors and nurses who conducted the experiment did not end up being prosecuted.
Headshot of Samantha Olson
SAMANTHA OLSON
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
