Sick Product of a Sick System

Pretty Good

People are voting emotionally.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Although the movie seems to have a pro-life undertone, it was quite good. The movie portrays a close-enough-to-realist take on the post apocalyptic genre, without an actual apocalypse. The movie relates emotions and the actresses did a great job.

This film should have been titled 'Hanging About in a House for Months With No Electricity'. Only in the final couple of minutes does the story start to do what the title promises, when the girls actually go Into the Forest. Following them in there, tracking their story of survival, might have been interesting. As it is, very little happens in the big modern house in the wood. One of the girls dances a lot, but misses her music. The other thinks about going off with her character-free boyfriend, but changes her mind. There is one nasty, very violent rape, dislocated from the rest of the story. The reason for the apocalyptic power cut is never convincingly explained and while the months tick by (we know this via helpful captions) the women are unchanged - even their hair stays the same, with one of them sporting the same razor-sharp cut after eight months that she had at the beginning. The season does not change either - three months, six months, whatever, it is still May. As for the ending, why would they set fire to the place? What possible reason was there to do that? (I wondered if it was an attempt to imitate the ending in Housekeeping, a brilliant and totally different film). Only two good things in this: the beautiful forest, what little we saw of it; and Evan Rachel Wood's beautiful face.

Electricity goes out, two sisters learn to survive off the land around their woodland home. And not to spoil the plot, but the power goes out and never comes back on. The explanation was sketchy and even North Korea rations electricity. Not the case here. Yes, the sisters get by and the film is more of a drama than any kind of action film as even the action scenes are made low key...more like real life. So if you are waiting for something to happen, it does, and life goes on without much fanfare. Good performances, realistic, once you get past the electricity never comes back on, however the entertainment value, at least for me is low.Evan Rachel Wood is actually younger than Ellen Page pushing 30...still playing a teen.Guide: F-word, sex, rape, brief nudity (Evan Rachel Wood, Ellen Page)

Seriously, in the ending I was like WTF, DUDE!? After delivering the baby, walking to the house in the rain, she decides to burn it down? I thought she was displaying a case of postpartum psychosis and wondering what is her sister gonna do about that... And what does she do? She agrees that the best option, with her sister's baby just having been born, is to burn the house and go live inside a tree bark while it's raining and doesn't look like it's gonna stop? WTF!?The movie was OK, performances OK, premise OK. What happens to our civilization if (when) we lose power and communications? How do we survive, having lost all our survival skills (or never even being learnt)? The film deals with issues such as human nature, people robbing and raping each other in case of a catastrophe, instead of helping out and joining forces.I feel like the most sensitive topics, like how do you preserve food and how do you grow food and how do you prepare food and how do you survive winters when there's no food around and... basically anything that's about survival has been left out. How do they survive 15 months in the forest? There only so much berries in the forests and they're not even there for the entire year... Though, they did show how they can (cook and sterilize) berries, which is respectable.All in all, the entire film was overshadowed by the ending. They didn't cover much of survival - OK, I can get over it, films don't have to be about what I expect them to be about - but the ending is a complete and absolute sack of... well you know what. So much from me.