The premise, drawn from an acclaimed 1963 novel by Marlen Haushofer, will inevitably call to mind Stephen King's "Under the Dome," but that comparison won't get you very far in explaining what "The Wall" is about. King's book and the TV miniseries based on it are about how a community interacts in isolation when catastrophe strikes, and the normal rules and systems are stripped away. "The Wall" is about the individual. Does a person remain human if they are totally without community?
The woman at first tries to test the boundaries, to find out whether she can somehow find a way out of the smaller world she now inhabits. The wall seems to enclose a very large area, but she cannot explore its far reaches without climbing out of her valley. Gradually, as the days pass, she adapts to her new reality, harvesting mushrooms and fruit from the forest, learning to hunt, planting a crop of potatoes from the supplies in the pantry.
And she thinks. She wonders if this new person she is becoming is her true self. She considers whether it is worth going on when there is no hope of ever seeing another human being again. She ponders the relationship of humans and dogs.
Ah, the dog. I've said that she is alone, but that's only if you count people. In fact, she has her friends' dog, and eventually a pregnant cow she finds wandering in the valley, and a cat, which soon has a kitten (suspicious, you might think, that two of the animals she finds are pregnant). She makes a little family out of these animals.
All of this we are told in the omnipresent voiceover that is both crucial and a weakness. Since this is a movie about a person thinking, we need the narration (which takes the form of a "report" she writes at some unspecified point in the future, still alone behind that wall). But there are times when you might wish, as I did, that she would just stop talking and let you contemplate the eerie stillness of her existence.
Very little happens in this movie that we might call a plot. This isn't about her heroic discovery of an escape route. She doesn't have to battle dangerous wild animals or overcome the kind of overblown adversity of a wilderness adventure in the Jack London tradition.
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