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The first time I watched The World to Come (2020), I had to pause the movie three times just to breathe. Not because it’s scary – far from it – but because the quiet, aching lesbian longing between Abigail (Katherine Waterston) and Tallie (Vanessa Kirby) felt so real it physically hurt. In a world that still pretends historical queer love stories are rare, this film screams the opposite: lesbian desire has always existed, even in the frozen 1850s American frontier, even when no one had the words for it.
Let’s be honest: most “period dramas” give us corsets and side-eye glances. The World to Come gives us two married women slowly, carefully, desperately falling in love while their husbands are literally in the next room. And it does it without ever feeling exploitative or like “lesbian content” made for the male gaze. This is a lesbian story told with lesbian tenderness, and that alone makes it precious.
The film starts slow – like, painfully slow if you’re not in the mood – but that slowness is the point. Abigail and her husband Dyer (Casey Affleck) are grieving the death of their little daughter. Their farm in upstate New York is isolated, the winter is brutal, and their marriage has turned into polite silence. Then Tallie and Finney (Christopher Abbott) move in nearby. Tallie walks into Abigail’s life like a burst of red hair and confidence, and from that very first visit you can feel the air change.
What kills me every time is how the movie shows lesbian attraction exactly the way it often happens in real life: small moments, stolen glances, reading too much into a brush of hands. Abigail writes in her diary (voice-over by Katherine Waterston that will break your soul) about how Tallie’s presence makes her “feel the blood in my veins again.” When they finally kiss – oh God, that first kiss in the barn – it’s not some dramatic movie kiss. It’s clumsy, urgent, terrified, perfect. You can practically hear both of them thinking “this is wrong but I would die if I stopped.”
Vanessa Kirby and Katherine Waterston deserve every award that exists for the way they look at each other. There’s a scene where they’re just sitting together peeling apples and you can feel the sexual tension so thick you want to scream at the screen. And yes, the sex scenes are there – gentle, passionate, unmistakably between two women who have never been touched the way they need to be touched before. No weird camera angles, no lingering on bodies for no reason. Just love. Just lesbian love.
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The tragedy, of course, is the world they live in. Their husbands aren’t cartoon villains (well… Finney kinda is), but they represent the cage of 19th-century marriage. The moment society notices something “improper” between the wives, everything starts closing in. I won’t spoil the ending if you haven’t seen it, but bring tissues. A lot of tissues.
What makes The World to Come different from other lesbian period films (like Portrait of a Lady on Fire – which I also worship) is how ordinary the women feel. They’re not artists or aristocrats. They’re farmers’ wives who milk cows and mend socks and still manage to fall deeply, impossibly in love. It’s a reminder that lesbian lives have always existed in the margins of history, even when no one bothered to write them down.
If you’re queer and you haven’t watched this yet, do it. Watch it with your girlfriend and hold her hand a little tighter during the quiet parts. Watch it alone and let yourself cry for every woman who ever loved another woman and had to hide it. Just watch it.
The World to Come isn’t a perfect movie – some people find it too slow, too bleak – but for me? It’s one of the most honest lesbian love stories ever put on screen. In a time when we’re finally getting more sapphic stories, this one feels like a gift from the past: proof that we’ve always been here, loving each other across centuries of snow and silence.
Go watch it. Then come back and tell me I’m not the only one completely destroyed by Abigail’s diary entries. I dare you.
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