“What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first… it’s amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree’s heartwood.”
Directed by Susanne Bier and based on Ron Rash‘s 2008 novel, Serena is set in 1930s North Carolina and tells the story of the newly-wed couple, Serena (Jennifer Lawrence) and George Pemberton (Bradley Cooper) as they return home to begin to build a timber empire. Although George has already lived in the camp long enough to father an illegitimate child, Serena soon shows herself to be the equal of any man, overseeing crews, hunting rattlesnakes, even saving her husband’s life in the wilderness. Together, they take charge of the woodlands and ruthlessly kill or vanquish all those who fall out of their favour. Yet when Serena learns that she will never bear a child, she sets out to murder the son that George has fathered without her.
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