Elaine Cassidy does her best screen work from inside a closed room, as young women cut off, held too close or watched. In The Wonder she is the one face nobody can read, and it is the right face for the film.
Fi1m perspective
Rosaleen O'Donnell sits at her daughter's bedside in The Wonder (2022), kisses the child, and the English nurse hired to watch the girl cannot tell what the kiss is for. Neither could we. Elaine Cassidy plays the mother so that love for the daughter and faith in God look exactly alike from the outside, and she never lets the camera see which one is in charge. Toby Jones's doctor wants the girl to be a marvel and Ciarán Hinds's priest wants her to be a saint, and you can read both of them in a scene. Rosaleen you cannot read in an hour.
That is where Cassidy has mostly worked: young women cut off, or held too tightly by one other person, inside houses that do not let much light in. Atom Egoyan cast her as the pregnant Irish teenager Felicia in Felicia's Journey (1999), opposite Bob Hoskins. Kirsten Sheridan gave her Runt in Disco Pigs (2001), from Enda Walsh's play, with Cillian Murphy as the other half of a pair who cannot be separated. The same year she was Lydia in Alejandro Amenábar's The Others, a film we rate highly and in which we did not single her out, which is fair to the film, since it belongs to Nicole Kidman and the dark, and not quite fair to her. Then Fingersmith (2005), as Maud Lilly in the BBC's Sarah Waters adaptation: another period house, another woman kept in it.
Television took her for most of the next decade. She led Harper's Island (2009) in America, played Katherine Glendenning in The Paradise (2012–2013), and spent three series as DC Dinah Kowalska in Paul Abbott's No Offence (2015–2018). The word that attaches to that ensemble work is solid, and it is meant kindly, though it is not the word anyone hopes for. Her reputation rests on the early leads and on the intensity she brought to them, and there has been less talk since about what else she can do.
The Wonder is the answer, or the beginning of one. The girl in the bed is played by her daughter, Kíla Lord Cassidy, and for the film's first hour the two of them are the only relationship on screen that does not announce its terms. We watched that bedside kiss and could not decide whether it was comfort or something colder, and it unsettled us more than anything in the film's noisier last half hour. That is a supporting part in a film we scored 63, and it is still the performance of hers we would send a stranger to.
Someone should give her a lead in a film again. It has been a long time since Disco Pigs.
Biography
Elaine Cassidy is an Irish actress. She was born on 31 December 1979 in Raheny and moved with her family to Kilcoole, County Wicklow, as a child. She began acting in school productions and took drama classes during secondary school.
Cassidy's film roles include Felicia in Felicia's Journey (1999), Lydia in The Others (2001), Runt in Disco Pigs (2001) and Ellie Seacord in The Loft (2014). On television she has appeared as Abby Mills in Harper's Island (2009), Maud Lilly in Fingersmith (2005), Katherine Glendenning in The Paradise (2012), Louisa de Clermont in A Discovery of Witches (2018) and Rosaleen O'Donnell in The Wonder (2022).
She has won two Irish Film and Television Awards, for Disco Pigs and Harper's Island. Cassidy married actor Stephen Lord in 2007.
