Into the Forest

TIFF 2015: Into the Forest Review

Special Presentations

What if everything just turned off one day? No internet, no phone, no power. Nothing.

That’s the intriguing backdrop for director Patricia Rozema’s Into the Forest, a small scale survival tale which imagines the end of the world not caused by an alien invasion or some natural disaster, but simply from a continent-wide power outage that’s never fully explained. Based on Jean Hegland’s 1996 novel, the film stars Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood as stepsisters living at a remote cabin with their father (Callum Keith Rennie) when the lights go out. Things begin to deteriorate quickly  as they tend to in these sorts of scenarios  and the young women must learn to survive in this new unplugged world.

Page and Wood are in top form, laying absolutely everything on the table both emotionally and physically for their respective roles. But the film, by its nature, doesn’t give the two a whole lot to do beyond subsist and survive. The remoteness of their cabin makes it a safe haven (most of the time), but it also means not a whole lot happens. Spread over almost two years, the movie takes on an an almost episodic feeling as time passes: A problem presents itself, the sisters work together to overcome it, fast forward a few months to when the next serious challenge to their survival crops up. Who said the end of the world was going to be exciting? Success for the pair is measured in small victories, like figuring out where their next meal is going to come from.

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It’s refreshing to see an apocalyptic scenario on film that doesn’t involve zombies or chrome hot rods – the film is simply women versus nature. It’s depressing that such a concept should seem novel in this day and age, but Into the Forest is not the sort of film that gets made very often. The two leads are so compelling to watch, but if only it all went somewhere. As interesting as the premise is and as good as Page and Wood’s performances are, Into the Forest limps to the finish line with a bizarre finale that is likely to leave audiences shrugging.

Screens

SEP 14 2:15 PM @ TIFF Bell Lightbox Cinema 2

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Dork Shelf's TIFF 2015 Guide



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