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Worth seeing, maybe – but where? I hate to say so, but it's hard to imagine many punters making the trek to the cinema for something as minor as Into the Forest. It has nothing to do with low budget, or not enough plot twists (or special effects). We need more, not fewer, character-based psychological dramas on the [Cypriot] big screen – but this particular one doesn't burrow deep enough, doesn't make the leap to a world without rules.

Television and YA novels have done their share of cross-breeding drama and extreme genre-determined scenarios; Rozema's sturdy film tugs effectively at the heartstrings with its tragic spiral and infuses one assault scene with true camera-canting terror.

Solid but unremarkable performances from Page and Wood, who aren't given much to work with apart from generic anxiety and low-key squabbling, contribute to the overall listlessness. Only in its final few minutes does Into The Forest suggest that it's creating an arresting new mythology, at which point it promptly and anticlimactically ends.

Ms. Rozema tries to build tension and sustain interest by thickening the atmosphere and layering on details rather than big incidents. Yet while she creates intimacy as well as interiority by visually closing in on each sister, as with repeated images of Nell reading alone and Eva twirling away, the movie lacks urgency. The world may be burning; here, it barely simmers.

Whatever metaphorical potential was inherent to this film's story is stunted by Rozema and Hegland's airtight conventional script, which never explores the ennui that Eva and Nell's situation might rouse within most persons.

While Page and Wood hardly look like sisters, their commanding, utterly believable performances remove any doubt. Nell and Eva's relationship forms the heart of the film and, along with the fleeting moments of ecstasy they find in things previously taken for granted—eating a piece of chocolate, watching home movies—their bond provides something of genuine beauty in a progressively bleak world.

Probably the most physically impressive production of Rozema's career: the adroit cinematography is by Daniel Grant, who moves his camera through and around the deluxe-cottage backdrop with purpose... Rozema has spent the last decade or so lost in the industrial forest that swallows up Canadian auteurs; now, it looks as if she's come out the other side.

Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood are both superb in the lead roles, but Rozema's emphasis on the primacy of family and nature exposes a deficit of visual and narrative imagination. Like the dwindling gas supply to the family generator, Page and Wood can only energize this melodrama for so long before it sputters out.