Hues of Ireland on screen in Netflix film The Wonder

Set in the midlands of Ireland 13 years after the Great Famine, The Wonder tells the story of nurse Lib Wright (Florence Pugh) who is recruited by a devout community to conduct an examination of Anna O’Donnell (Kíla Lord Cassidy), an 11-year-old girl who claims not to have eaten for four months, surviving miraculously on “manna from heaven”. As Anna’s health rapidly deteriorates, Lib is determined to unearth the truth, challenging the faith of a community that would prefer to stay believing.

Transporting audiences to 19th century, the exterior scenes were filmed in County Wicklow, with natural Irish landscapes proving an inspiration to shoot in. Cinematographer Ari Wegner paid tribute to the wonderful colours of Ireland: “the green-ness, and a deep, rich brown – a real rainbow of green and brown – and also this kind of purple-y heather.”  Director Sebastián Lelio added: “Everything changes all the time in terms of the sky … the drama of those landscapes is incredible.”

Exterior filming took place in the Glenasmole Valley on the Old Military Road, an area of heather hills, bog and heathland known locally as the Featherbeds, with scenes filmed including Niamh Algar taking part in the historic practice of Turf Cutting.  This part of the Dublin Mountains was an important source of household turf in the last century, particularly during the second world war when coal supplies to the capital city were interrupted. 

The landscape is wild and open with atmospheric heather dotting the landscape and peat banks on the gentle lower slopes of the hills that rise in the background. There are also spectacular views of the Dublin Mountains as they merge into Wicklow Mountains, with roadside viewing points above Glenasmole also providing panoramic views of Dublin City and Dublin Bay.

For the spirit grocery, where Lib stays in the film, Production Designer Grant Montgomery and Sebastián Lelio happened upon a café in the village of Redcross, County Wicklow. “I looked at him and I said, ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’” recalls Montgomery. “We walked through the whole location. It was a stroke of huge luck to get something that allowed us to have a three-sixty universe, as you call it. We took over and then converted. It allowed us to have all of those multiple sets interconnected. So, you could move from upstairs in Lib’s bedroom in the spirit grocery, down the stairway, into the dining room, into the bar, into the front of the grocery, out into the yard and into the mortuary. It allowed you that complete universe because to split it just would have been difficult for Sebastian to have a very free-flowing aesthetic of shooting.”

Turning a 21st-century café into a spirit grocery in 1862 was a huge undertaking. Montgomery was inspired by the paintings of American realist artist Andrew Wyeth in the mid-20th century, by the “greens and browns” in Emma Donoghue’s early drafts of the script, by a book he studied on the architecture and furniture of the period, and by an exhaustive tome on the Great Famine.
As for the O’Donnell’s house where much of the watch takes place, Montgomery chose to build the house at Sally’s Gap in Wicklow County.

The interior of the O’Donnell house was recreated in an aeroplane hangar just outside of Dublin. In a case of production designer and Director of Photography working as one, Wegner sought to light the interior in such a way as to “blend them”, saying, “That’s always my big anxiety, for an audience to believe that someone’s just crossed over the wall, and they’re still in the same place. Conveniently for me, there were these very small windows and these very small shutters that allowed a sense of, once you step inside the house, you’re really in a kind of cave that’s separate. It works thematically. We tried to bring the colours of the outside in. So the greens and the golden brown, and also all the walls have a dampness and a roundness. There are no hard, straight lines, really, anywhere. It feels handmade.”

www.ireland.com