Historical drama “The World to Come” has so much going for it — atmosphere, locations, situational tensions and performances — that its lingering diffuseness is puzzling, like a promised but undelivered rain for a well-laid seedbed.
The weight of seasons is a time marker of sorts for this 19th-century lesbian romance between neighboring pioneer wives played by Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby, and in director Mona Fastvold’s stark, attentive movie, the interior weather is as fully expressed as the exterior kind. But in adapting short story maestro Jim Shepard’s tale of intense attraction bred in unforgiving isolation, the movie mistakes wordiness for worthiness and telling for showing.