Serena - movie review: 'Half the audience will be there to watch Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper hump'

Lust makes the world go round. So does schadenfreude. Half of the audiences for Serena will be there to watch Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper tear off each other's clothes and hump. The rest will be there because this offering from Oscar-winner Susanne Bier, having been spoken of in the same breath as Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, has spent two years on the shelf and is now being talked down as a stinker of epic proportions.

Serena, set in 1930s North Carolina, is a seriously weird melodrama, one that (given its much delayed arrival) feels surprisingly cutting-edge. Think of it as a Depression-era Gone Girl. As in that global hit, a blonde, go-getting goddess-type (Lawrence) captures the heart of a cute, libidinous, successful guy (Cooper), only to become the high-maintenance spouse of his nightmares. She punishes him for “betraying” her; he fights back, but is overwhelmed by the strength of her will.

Of course, we’ve met difficult dames before, the best of the lot being Shakespeare’s Cleopatra (the term “crazy bitch” may not have been common parlance in 1607, but Cleo was certainly a handful). Serena does her complex forebear proud. Both intelligent and insecure, she’s a feminist who doesn’t actually like other women; a nature-lover who wants to expand, rather than rein in, her husband’s brutal logging business. She’s also obsessed with the desire to give him a male heir. For all her bravado, she has little self-belief. Critics have complained that she makes no sense yet it’s the contradictions that make her interesting.

Lawrence is gripping in the role, luminously beautiful but never doll-like. Often cast as a self-sacrificing older sister — Ree in Winter’s Bone, Katniss in The Hunger Games — the actress explores something darker, here. The camera (mostly hand-held) floats over her face and settles on her shifty eyes. Serena loves slinky outfits and her wondrous flesh, enveloped by fabric, calls to mind Tamara de Lempicka’s Portrait of a Young Girl in a Green Dress. It’s her eyes, however, that leave us shaken.

Cooper gets too much duff dialogue to really shine. Still, just having Mr Blue Eyes on board adds to the film’s energy. Men undone by voracious females are rarely played by A-list heartthrobs. First Gone Girl, and now Serena, suggest the rules of the chick flick have changed. About time, too.