The World to Come (2020) review

Married couple Abigail (Katherine Waterston) and Dyer (Casey Affleck) have their lives decimated when their only child passes away - Dyer, grouchily, keeps working the land while Abigail escapes into an affair with Tallie (Vanessa Kirby), which sets off Tallie's husband Finney (Christopher Abbott).  One can tell where this is going just a short time in - there's that smoldering lesbian stare between Abi and Tallie - which I've seen in what feels like too many movies of late (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Ammonite) and what's probably a distortion of historical sexual mores to appease today's audiences, and the rest seems stretched out before tragedy inevitably hits (a love that can never be, etc.).  I didn't quite get the 'poignancy' of the tryst - the husbands are demonized for no reason - and the voice-over is too "writerly" ("When she left, I was like a skiff at sea with neither hand nor helm to guide it," "Our whole house now seems both angry and repentant," etc.).  It should have stayed a very short story.