In Depression-era North Carolina, the barren wife (Jennifer Lawrence) of an ambitious timber baron (Bradley Cooper) learns that she cannot ever bear children after she suffers a miscarriage with their first child. Then she sets out to murder the woman who bore her husband an illegitimate son.
Given these unpromising circumstances, I was expecting something truly awful, and perhaps that might have been more fun to watch than this lugubrious period piece. The production values and the costumes are the true stars.
In other words, a lot of people realized they had an epic clunker on their hands.
South China Morning Post
April 11, 2016
The narrative has the choppy quality of a badly bowdlerised book, and the result is not bad so much as boring - and best thought of as a tree, fallen in the forest, that nobody heard.
The actors don't just look uncomfortable in their period duds, they also look uneasy in their own skins, which is a feat for two such natural, physically confident screen performers.
