Serena

In 1929, timber magnate George Pemberton (Bradley Cooper) and his new wife Serena (Jennifer Lawrence) look to profit from their holdings in western North Carolina. The threat of government encroachment and Serena’s inability to conceive a child push the couple to take desperate and violent actions.

After both Cooper and Lawrence have achieved so much success (both individually and collaboratively) these past few years, any film featuring them as the leads seems a safe bet to continue along that trajectory. Despite this, Serena was bafflingly released direct to video on demand. Yet for its impressive pedigree, it isn’t hard to see why. This inept adaptation of Ron Rash’s novel is inept on many fronts.

Both Suzanne Bier’s direction and Christopher Kyle’s script leave a lot to be desired. The former somewhat underplays the handsome scenery of the setting and suffers from pacing that feels at once rushed and (a chase sequence aside) dull and devoid of much tension. The latter succeeds in giving George more of a backstory, but reduces Rachel, the mother of his child (a more important character in the book) to a minor role. It also changes Serena’s characterization for the worse. In the novel, she was a frightening figure: collected, confident, supremely competent, and ruthlessly ambitious. Here, she gets a cool and composed veneer that cracks almost immediately following her miscarriage. While this might be done to make her more sympathetic, this more wounded version of Serena is also less formidable.

Not all of the fault here can be placed behind the camera. The accents are simply atrocious. Cooper conveys conflicted motivations as he mumbles his way through something resembling Bostonian (the character hailed from New England) while the usually reliable Toby Jones is utterly unconvincing as a southern sheriff. Lawrence is OK in the lead – she offers enough sincerity to keep Serena from being a mere femme fatale cliché – but this is far from her best work.  

“Read the book instead” is often used as a put-down by those who disapprove of any changes, no matter how pragmatic, a film makes to the source material, but in this case, it’s sound advice that will save you almost two hours. This woodlands wannabe Macbeth simply doesn’t cut it.

5.25/10