Things that go bump in The Forest
GHOSTS IN THE TREES: Natalie Dormer encounters demons and some lazy storytelling in this horror flick
For rating purposes, I’ve long followed the rule that if a comedy made me laugh a few times, I should give it an extra star regardless of how I felt about it otherwise.
Horror, like comedy, has audience reaction as a litmus test. So an otherwise unremarkable little horror film like The Forest gets points because there are at least four jump-out-at-you-when-you-least-expect it shocks. It’s really more a series of neat feats of camerawork and timing by director Jason Zada, aided by the primal fear invoked by the woods at night.
Those chills go a long way to buying slack for a plot that often defies logic, tosses Americans incongruously into a consummately Japanese story, and features character ambiguity that seems more lazy than deliberate.
Dubiously dubbed as, “based on a true story,” The Forest takes place mainly in Aokigahara, the so-called Suicide Forest at the foot of Mount Fuji (Serbia’s Tara Forest actually stands in). The “true story” part is that Japan has a suicide problem, and Aokigahara has become a go-to place for those intent on ending their lives. Demons are debatable.
In The Forest, Game of Thrones’ Natalie Dormer plays Sara, whose twin Jess (also Dormer), has gone missing from her job as an English teacher in Tokyo and was last seen heading you-know-where. Sara and Jess’s bond is especially strong because they share a life-and-death childhood secret.
So Sara leaves behind her concerned husband (Eoin Macken), on a vague mission to head to the Suicide Forest and find her (her “twin intuition” telling her that Jess is still alive).
The meat of the movie comes when her quest leads to a decision to spend the night deep in the suicide woods.
Before she gets there, she meets weird Japanese people (including a mortuary keeper and one of her sister’s overwrought ghost-fearing students), and an American journalist named Aiden (Chicago Fire’s Taylor Kinney), who’s there because … well, I forget.
Is Aiden on the level? Is he a friend? Is he a psycho? Kinney is called upon to keep us in the dark, which is actually a pretty easy job, acting-wise. Which is the thing about a movie like this — starring two actors on hiatus from their respective TV series. With only a few weeks to work with, Dormer isn’t going to give us a Tom Hardy-calibre portrayal of twins. One’s blond, one’s brunette, one’s Betty, one’s Veronica. And performancewise, her two jobs are to maintain a look of fear and her American accent respectively.
Still, the portion of The Forest in which Sara encounters various malevolent yurei (suicide ghosts), contains its share of surprises, and at its best, comes off as Evil Deadlite (minus the mordant sense of humour).
It may not be a transcendent film, but it’s encouraging that fear still holds sway over revulsion in the horror genre.