Weak dialogue drives thriller off spooky track
The Forest (out of 4) Starring Natalie Dormer, Taylor Kinney and Yukiyoshi Ozawa. Directed by Jason Zada. 93 minutes. Opening Friday at major theatres. 14A If only The Forest had taken its own advice.
Various characters warn American Sara Price (Natalie Dormer of Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games franchise) to stay on the path as she goes sleuthing in Japan’s notorious “suicide forest.”
She’s on the hunt for her missing identical twin, Jess (also played by Dormer) in this dull thriller that aimlessly wanders into incomprehensible territory as it borrows from so many other genre flicks it’s in creative overdraft.
Aokigahara forest at the base of Mt. Fuji is indeed a real place — one where people go to end their lives — and has been used as a setting for other films, making for an interesting reality-based setting for a thriller.
But The Forest fails to make good use of the spooky setting, abandoning hinted-at plot twists while leaving threads dangling and indulging weird leaps in logic. A leaden, committee-written script and underwritten characters, especially beefy American travel writer Aiden ( Chicago Fire’s Taylor Kinney), don’t help matters.
Aiden may have other things on his mind when he offers to act as feisty Sara’s forest guide, but she’s oblivious, too focused on the sixth senselike twin-connection she has with her sister. Like Timmy letting Lassie know he’s in the well, Jess sends her "save me" vibes to Sara, who picks them up by furrowing her brow.
Sara is sure something bad has happened to Jess, who took a job teaching in Japan and hasn’t been seen since she went into Aokigahara.
Serbia’s Tara National Forest stands in for Japan, a setting filled with towering trees and dark glades that lends itself to unsettling vibes, especially thanks to talk of Japanese ghosts who are fond of messing with intruders’ minds and exploiting their sadness to make them harm themselves.
Local guide Michi (Yukiyoshi Ozawa) takes Aiden and Sara into the woods via the road marked “no entry” but any sense of foreboding disappears thanks to dialogue that has all the spark of wet flannel.
Directed by first-timer Jason Zada, who spends too much time taking close-ups of nature and too little keeping the story on track, the scares are strictly of the midway haunted house variety, although I did enjoy the creepy Japanese schoolgirl ghost. But the weak, hole-filled script and an uneven contribution from Kinney doesn’t help.
At least Dormer can now tick “scream queen” off her list of thankless jobs aspiring young actresses often have to do to establish themselves.