Into the Forest (2016)

Patricia Rozema's Into the Forest arrives bearing the quiet dignity of a Canadian apocalypse, which is to say the world ends and everyone continues to be polite about it. Two sisters, Nell and Eva, occupy a remote house while the electrical grid dissolves into rumor and silence. Their father dies under a chainsaw. A man named Stan arrives to take what he wants. The film regards all of this with a steady, unhurried gaze, as though catastrophe were simply another chore on a long list of chores. We have seen the end of the world many times. Rarely has it been this tidy.

The sisters survive without men, which carries a certain weight. Eva is raped and chooses to bear the child, and the film treats her reasoning with respect instead of turning it into a position paper. A woman directed it, and two women carry nearly every frame. Those facts register. What does not register is any broader program. The collapse is technological, not climatic. There is no critique of markets, no meditation on race, no sermon about bodies or brains. The cast is white and the forest is just a forest. The film has no interest in instructing us, which is its own small mercy.

What remains is a survival story told at a deliberate pace, occasionally mistaking slowness for depth. The moralizing, such as it is, amounts to sisters should love each other, a sentiment difficult to dispute and equally difficult to build a movement upon. It is a modest film with modest ambitions, competent and sincere and allergic to speeches. We score it accordingly, with the weary gratitude of a critic who has sat through far louder apocalypses and lived to file the paperwork.