“The Forest” is filled with moments and pieces that beg you to solve the greater mystery that’s at play. A clue here. A subtlety there. A mysterious flashback, or a bit of dialogue that others watching may have missed.
Unfortunately, as you plod through this uninspired and dull movie, you figure out that there isn’t anything deeper than the obvious plot. The story is so simple and so boring you won’t be scared of anything other than the thought of having wasted 90 minutes of life watching it.
Natalie Dormer of ‘Game of Thrones’ fame stars, and she’s a very effective actress. Dormer plays Sara Price, who travels to Japan’s sinister Aokigahara (nicknamed the suicide forest) to search for her missing twin sister. Dormer is involved in every scene in the movie, and she’s a treat to watch with an unheralded beauty and soft demeanor that makes her perfect as a horror movie damsel in distress. Except, there isn’t really any distress in the film.
“The Forest” plays on the real life legends that the actual Aokigahara is said to have. People go to the wood to commit suicide, and their ghostly souls are left to roam the trees. Sara is offered warnings from various locals like “the spirits cannot rest, they come back angry!” Or, “once inside the forest don’t leave the path.” Sara is of course skeptical of the legend, and wants to find her twin sister, whom she has a deeper bond with than an ordinary sibling.
One would think a movie like this, set in the darkness of a supposedly haunted forest, would excel at making the viewer terrified. The frightful moments are all of the jump scare nature, and most are completely unrelated to the plot, like a man sticking his face up against the taxi window that Sara is in, or her having a bad dream from her hotel room, and not the forest itself.
The short run time delivers little for depth. We get a few insights as to the relationship and history between Sara and her twin sister Jess (also Dormer) but as mentioned before, the idea that something much larger is happening is all for naught when the story concludes.
Sara is joined by a reported named Aiden (Taylor Kinney) and a superstitious guide named Michi (Yukiyoshi Ozawa). But these characters are really unnecessary other than making convenient parts of the plot easily explained. It would probably be scarier had Sara gone into the woods alone, but oh well.
“The Forest” is a bad movie. Its slow, boring, and not scary in any way.
by – Matt DeCristo
