Into the Forest (2016)

directed by Patricia Rozema
Canada
101 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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If you look at Patricia Rozema's filmography, you'll notice that while she's a fairly influential name in unsung Canadiana, she doesn't have any other movies with speculative- or science-fictional elements, just dramas. When a director known only for doing strictly non-genre films puts out a movie that has genre elements in it, usually it will be more thoughtful than a movie directed by somebody who's only ever worked with genre film. It can also sometimes mean that the one-off genre movie will be treated as more of a metaphor than anything else, that it won't really be a genre film, it'll just use fantastical concepts to disguise a hidden meaning- but Into the Forest is most definitely an apocalypse film, as it appears on the surface.

This apocalypse is a frightening one indeed because it's both slow and sudden. It comes about like a bad power outage after a storm, first the power fails and you don't think too much of it but before long the power has been out for longer than you expected and you start to have doubts that it'll ever come back on. This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang but with a flicker, the herald of the apocalypse not angels with trumpets but an unexpected power cut that seems innocent at first until it starts to threaten lives.

While this is solidly a movie set during the collapse of society as we know it, it is also a catharsis film. It's the kind of thing you can watch and get immersed in and before you know it you'll be feeling the characters' pain right there with them. Evan Rachel Wood and Ellen Page support this movie entirely, and their brilliant performances bring the emotions of the film to life, making it feel like you're watching something that's really happening instead of a fictional situation. The narrative of nature being "smart" while urbanized society (smartphones, cars, etc) is "dumb" is overused and ignores the needs of people who depend on technology for their livelihood, but the narrative of nature as the cradle of humanity that will always be there for us if and when we need it will always be a true and accurate description of the connection between person and wild.

A quick note on how I appreciated the way the women were characterized- Rozema draws a lot of focus on their bodies but never in a sexual way, there's definitely a distinct fascination with the "womanly form" as it were but rather than pointing a voyeuristic lens at the women getting naked it focuses on things like dancing, having an intimate moment with the last chocolate they may ever eat, splitting wood, just generally showing their bodies as the capable machines they are while retaining a sense of grace and beauty not depicted in an exploitative way.

Fair warning, there is a rape scene that gets pretty uncomfortable; like everything else though it isn't cheap or exploitative and actually takes the time to show what something like that can do to a person and how it can change somebody's entire personality afterwards. I feel the same way about that scene as I felt towards the entire movie, it deals with pretty difficult matters in a graceful and tender way to create a portrait of two sisters forced back into the woods by their circumstances, surviving as best they know how while trying to retain their humanity.