Starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. Rated 14A.

Some bad movies make you want to reach out and help, while others invite you to sit back and enjoy the train wreck. Then there’s Serena, a movie to forget as quickly as possible. That must be true for its otherwise talented actors, who obviously started the forgetting process while the damn thing was getting made.

Presumably, the cast was excited to work for esteemed Danish director Susanne Bier (After the Wedding, In a Better World) on an adaptation of Ron Rash’s well-respected novel about gothic doings in a Depression-era timber camp. Once they were stuck in the woods outside of Prague, doubling for North Carolina, and forced to mouth the anodyne words of screenwriter Christopher Kyle (K-19: The Widowmaker), something else took over. The dead eyes, flat recitations, and constantly shifting accents suggest utter rejection of the material, not the result of too much partying on the set.

How else can we comprehend the blandly recessive performance of Bradley Cooper, as corrupt lumber baron George Pemberton, and the gratingly bad one from Jennifer Lawrence, as the title character? (When Serena, an orphan and fire victim, agrees to marry George, she’s breaking her own promise “to never love anyone ever again!”) The leads clicked twice before in recent memory, and that must have promised silver linings to the company that hustled up the money for this stinker. That outfit has since gone broke, and the film was shelved for almost two years.

This ineffectual project also manages to embarrass Rhys Ifans, as a tracker reflecting the evil that comes from its central union, and Toby Jones, as a local sheriff who has some small objections to their plans to rape the environment and screw the locals. The film itself comments on none of this, and seems to think it’s a Clark Gable–Ava Gardner movie about nothing at all. It’s not that surprising. Bier failed to find the right footing in her previous English-language efforts, Love Is All You Need and Things We Lost in the Fire, and here seems to have lost the ability to frame a shot, edit a decent sequence, and make eye contact with her actors. You should look away, as well.