Despite the terrific set design in The World to Come, the characters don’t feel at home in it; they do very little farm work, for example. Still, Waterston and Kirby do achieve an intimacy that operates as a warm fire warding off the chilliness around them. It’s too bad we were left out in the cold.

G. Allen Johnson

San Francisco Chronicle

The immersive look of the film, with its strikingly unadorned landscapes and dim-lit interiors, casts a spell, and Waterston (the Fantastic Beasts franchise) and Kirby (The Crown, Pieces of Woman), bring both urgency and fragility to their constrained characters — two lost souls aligned and finding love in a hopeless place.

Leah Greenblatt

Entertainment Weekly

Waterston and Kirby are both superb at creating characters whose attraction must be shown to grow by degrees, without overt admission. Affleck and Abbott, too, navigate a tricky dynamic, playing men who perhaps lack an understanding of their own compassion or brutishness.

Ben Kenigsberg

The New York Times