There’s a movie out in theaters starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, and nobody cares. This seems impossible.

In "Silver Linings Playbook" and "American Hustle," the duo shoutingly charmed themselves into Oscar races, $100 million grosses and America’s hearts. In just the last five years, Lawrence and Cooper have seven Oscar nominations and one win. For a while, the former was the star of the highest grossing movie in back-to-back years with "Catching Fire" and "Mockingjay: Part 1," until she was passed by – you guessed it – Cooper and "American Sniper" (with "Guardians of the Galaxy" also close behind). So the fact that there’s a film starring this critical and financial dream team playing right now in near anonymity seems completely baffling.

And then I actually saw "Serena," and ooooooh, it all makes so much sense now. Now I get why the film is trying to tiptoe in and out of its few theaters (plus a VOD release) like an embarrassed one night stand the morning after. No wonder people don’t know or care about the Depression-era romantic drama; even its own stars don’t seem particularly interested. They resemble balsa cut-outs in a soapy Appalachian melodrama that’s just as stiff and wooden.

Yes, lumber is the star in "Serena" and not just thanks to the performances. Rocking an in-and-out JFK aristocrat vocal inflection, Cooper plays timber baron George Pemberton, reaping as much of the North Carolina woods as possible while providing his workers with dangerous labor and low wages – but work during the Depression nonetheless. On a trip up to Boston, he falls in love with Serena (Lawrence), a cheerful but damaged young lady with a tragic, fiery past. Even so, he insists the two marry – "I think we should be married" are literally his first words to her – and after an odd series of vague, wannabe passionate fade-to-black transitions, the two return to North Carolina together as one.

Things are not well, however, in the burly backwoods. George’s right-hand man Buchanan (David Dencik) doesn’t take well to Serena’s increasingly prominent role and voice in the company – due to a tinge of jealousy both professional and romantic, as Serena guesses. No matter the reason, the tension continues to grow, no thanks to a local sheriff (Toby Jones, Dr. Zola in the "Captain America" movies) pursuing the company’s potentially dirty dealings with government officials.

The young couple’s home life doesn’t fare much better, with Serena shooting concerned side-eye at Rachel (Ana Ularu), a local woman quietly raising George’s baby. Their frosty, wordless relationship only gets worse after the desperately committed Serena loses a baby of her own, leaving her incapable of having a child again – all while George’s lingering, wistful glances over at Rachel and his secret child grow in length.

Adapting Ron Rash’s book, Danish director Susanne Bier (the 2011 Best Foreign Film winner "In a Better World") and cinematographer Morten Soberg give the novelist’s deep-woods story a rather beautiful visual chill. The ravishing misty mountain landscapes and gritty, grimy forest alcoves feel oh so slightly subdued by an unseen, foreboding frostiness.

So the trees look nice, but unfortunately it’s damn impossible to see the forest. Rash’s story may be a tale of heated passions and grand ambitions (Cooper’s character is not only trying to tear down a mountain for God’s sake, but also hunt a panther that eats its victims’ hearts), but under Bier’s dulled and wooden control, the only thing pumping through its veins is sap. Scenes are edited together into a rhythmless clump with little sense of flow, and "Serena" as a whole suffers from a regal, literary stiffness.

That unfortunately extends to the film’s talented stars. Usually these two dive into their roles. Cooper bulked up and brought what little depth there was to "American Sniper"; Lawrence IS Katniss Everdeen. They both reached for the great big loony stars in "American Hustle," and while only one (Cooper) got there, they were both audience-grabbing performances.

No such luck here. Most of the time, the two clearly feel distinctly like actors in old time slacks and gowns, and if you didn’t know better, you’d think the two never even met before the shoot – much less starred in two other movies together. We’re talking "50 Shades of Grey" press tour levels of non-chemistry, a problem when that romance is the center of the drama.

The formal dialogue in Christopher Kyle’s screenplay is fairly stiff to begin with, but the actors’ delivery carries nothing. "Our love began the day we met; nothing that happened before even exists," Serena asserts, though "asserts" gives it too much credit. There’s nothing there: no passion, no strengthen, no sense of danger or love. It just rings echoingly hollow.

Most of the dialogue plays that way (a personal favorite is Serena, overlooking the mountains and woods, noting, "That’s beautiful George," with the enthusiasm of someone who’s just sat through a seven-hour lecture on 1920s lumber economics). At best, with the help of the chilled natural cinematography, it comes off ominously icy, but it’s still hard to devote much to these characters and their passions when it’s routinely difficult to find a pulse.

It only gets worse as those passions timidly flame up into an increasingly silly backwoods period soap opera involving deception, furious screams, several bloody deaths and a panther attack. And yet even with all of that escalatingly ridiculous melodrama, the movie keeps up its pretensions of middlebrow taste and grand drama. The panther attack, for instance, is the finale to the worst kind of metaphor, one both annoyingly obvious and annoyingly meaningless.

Occasionally Bier crafts a decently intense sequence, like a hunt in the woods with the growingly distrustful George and Buchanan. But even though it’s a briefly tense scene, I also hated the hackneyed direction it was pointing itself toward. 

As for Lawrence and Cooper, they’re still undoubtedly talented actors, and occasionally you get a glimpse of a spark – of sadness, of regret, of fear – underneath these cold characters and predictable drama. Even with all the kindling around, those few sparks in "Serena" never catch into even just a smolder of life.

Don’t worry, they’ve already moved on quite nicely; after all, the movie was filmed all the way back in 2012, so they’ve had plenty of time and plenty more hits to wash away this flop. And judging by the feather’s footprint it’s left so far on the movie-going public, it’s already well on its way to being forgotten. If a flop falls in the forest and no one’s around to see it, does it make a sound? It seems we may have an answer.