Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Brennan Camacho Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Ella-May O'Brien Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Dana An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

ccbo Time to think and reflect, time to ponder. Opportunity to reflect on the darkness of suffering hearts, feeling of misery and love slowly turning into madness - thats how it felt in smokey mountains, a classical greek tragedy, but with entangled stories!

jarbuck I've never seen a more severely distorted movie adaptation from a novel than with Serena. The saga written by Ron Rash paints a picture of a Serena we never see on screen. She is independent, fierce, and unsympathetic from the first scene in the book. She is always in control; if by chance something takes her off guard, she strikes back quickly. There's a reason the novel is simply called Serena, not George Pemberton's Wife has a Breakdown. To read it is to be intrigued by a multifaceted, engaging woman.

smoke0 First off, don't believe any reviews that claim the book was great, because it wasn't, and if you want to know why, check various book sites, as it's been reviewed by enough readers, including myself, who found it severely lacking in character development and general engagement. Anyone who enjoyed it had to be subconsciously filling in the blanks, and this movie at least does that much, using actors we like to bring some humanity to the book's wooden and opaque archetypes. The storyline is always compacted in a film adaptation and what was lost from the book wasn't that important overall, and if you view this as a Cliff's Notes of the novel you'll be better off. If you really need to read the book, do it after you see the movie, so you can at least add some subtext to the characters.

Predrag I usually write a review only when my opinion drastically differentiates from what I find already contributed - when there's a dire need to tip the scale. And there is one here, to save this incredible film from the lynch mob. This atmospheric dark period romance set in an unusual stage has a lot of human drama to offer. And this is what S. Bier is known at excelling. And pouring it on, which obviously irritates some part of the audience. But it is all done with a lot of taste for timing, with a good and fresh modern editing which disposes of most needless parts of the action and instead rather reserves that time for us to think about it all during the breaks of foggy Smoky Mountains scenery. (Obfuscation plays a leading role here, and this landscape couldn't be a better choice.) Film is layered with appropriately somber music used/mixed with subtlety, and likewise its gorgeous photography has been wonderfully appreciated by the edit which understands its visual potential. This is one of those rare instances where a pattern of hand-held closeups doesn't seem gratuitous, but does manage to bring us closer to the characters. Beside this being the result of the strong characters themselves, it is also a combination of a slower, not-frenetic pace, with a lot of static masters too. While there might be some unbelievable decisions the characters make in this story, we need to remind ourselves that instead of treating this as a negative, these are the emotional extremes we should be welcoming, in an emotional rawness which needs appreciation. At the end, it is an emotional and symbolic theater in which all the elements and symbols have and live to deliver their wonderfully intertwined meanings.