The Forest (2016)
PG-13, 95 mins
Directed by: Jason Zada
Written by: Nick Antosca, Sarah Cornwell, Ben Ketai
Currently in Theatres.
Natalie Dormer (Game of Thrones) stars as Sara Price and in a duel role as her missing twin sister, Jess Price. Through a series of cross-cuts we see that Sara has a sort of psychic bond with her sister Jess. Jess teaches English to grade school aged children in Japan and has disappeared into the Aokigahara Forest at the northwest base of Mt. Fuji.
In the movie and in reality, the forest is infamous for its supposed past of locals practicing ubasute, or the abandonment of an elderly parent within the forest to die. Folklore says these acts cause the yūrei (angry spirits) of those abandoned to haunt visitors. This forest also happens to be one of the most popular places on earth to commit suicide. In 2010, there were more than 200 attempted suicides and as many as 105 bodies have been removed from the forest in a single year. All searches are called off after 48 hours and the individual is assumed dead.
This is the predicament Sara finds herself in, everyone else thinks that Jess is already dead. So Sara flies to Japan in an attempt to once again bail her sister out of a bad situation. Sara accepts this burden because of a traumatic experience the two shared as children which Jess got the worse end of. At a bar outside the forest, Sara meets a journalist from Australia (Taylor Kinney) who is starting a story on the forest the next day. He persuades her to allow him to use her story to add a human element to his piece in exchange for accompaniment from he and his guide to unmarked areas of the forest.
The Good:
Natalie Dormer isn’t bad on the eyes and has decent chemistry with both herself and Taylor Kinney. I said decent, mind you, it’s not as if the performance is setting the world afire. The amazing premise offers some opportunity for great tension and scares, some of which are delivered. I enjoyed the tension in a scene where Sara is being tormented while inside a tent. That’s a scary situation, you’re very vulnerable to whatever is outside but you can’t see where it might attack from. Sara is overzealous in her attempt to find her sister and makes some poor decisions, these are understandable but we get to see the repercussions and I think it’s a reasonable representation of the potential paranoia someone might face in this situation.
The Bad:
The cross-cuts I mentioned add nothing and just jumble the timeline, we get the point, but it’s wholly unnecessary. Telling the story in a linear fashion would have been as good or better. There are ridiculous jump scares on occasion; the random homeless guy banging the window, walking down a dark hallway for no reason but to be scared by the shadow hanging out at the back of that dark hallway. This jump scare was effective but it would be nice if there were a reason to venture down the hall. The most egregious cliché in the film is a dream jump scare that takes place within a forest said to be haunted by hundreds of evil spirits. Why on earth do we need a dream scare in this situation?!! That has to be my current least favorite horror trope and it has no place in this film in that forest. Replace it with a hallucination and it accomplishes the same thing and pays better service to the story.
The Horror:
It’s PG-13 and has little blood but The Forest falls firmly within the realm of horror. You can expect numerous jump scares and a few moments of psychological horror as well as a few truly tense moments.
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