Jason Zada's 2016 film
The Forest had some incredible potential, as its spooky poster suggests--although the image of nooses hanging from the trees misses the point of the suicide forest's symbolic importance and goes straight for dumb Hollywood literalism. No subtlety here. The film follows Sara (Nathalie Dormer) as she travels to Japan in search of her identical twin, Jess, who has disappeared in Japan's famous "suicide forest" on Mount Fuji. Sara has her share of "fish out of water" outsider encounters once she reaches Japan, including a hokey moment where her sushi is delivered alive and wriggling at a Tokyo bar. She also seems haunted by the memory of her parents' death, supposedly in a drunk driving car crash right outside their front door when she and Jess were just kids. Jess was the unlucky twin who saw the bodies, marking her forever as the screw-up that Sara rushes to protect/clean up after. In many ways, Sara is a quintessential "haunted heroine," plagued by an early childhood trauma that haunts her present, even as she travels to far flung locales. Yet, the haunted space that Sara must traverse is one of lush, natural beauty, rather than the unhomely home.
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| Sara wanders...and wanders...and wanders around the Suicide forest, searching for her sister |
Many horror films make the most of a forest setting, effectively conveying a sense of acute "lostness" as urban/suburban characters stumble along in an unfamiliar milieu.
The Blair Witch Project comes immediately to mind, and
The Forest employs some of the same shaky hand-held camera work to ill effect. Sara is repeatedly told by a bevy of English speakers (since she cannot be bothered to even learn to say hello in Japanese) that she should not stray from "the path" in the forest, yet in the most typical horror film fashion, she does so immediately. Even with advice from a hunky guy she picks up at a bar and a trusted guide he enlists to help her, she spends most of the film running around aimlessly, calling her sister's name, and encountering a series of dopey, nonsensical jump scares supposedly representing the angry spirits housed in said forest. The film became so incredibly tedious after a time, that I chose to get up to deal with the laundry instead of nodding off. Nothing remotely scary here.
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| Sara starts "seeing things" with more frequency as the spell of the forest takes hold |
Unfortunately, the film's split personality--shifting constantly between female subjective psychological horror and scary Japanese ghost horror--allows neither approach to really succeed. Sara and Jess's traumatic past (who exactly saw something nasty in the basement?) creates a rather compelling narrative, and speaks to the heartbreak and acute mental distress that drives Sara to embark on this journey in the first place. Yet, her personal horrors do not match up with the stream of gray-streaked ghost faces popping up at inopportune moments throughout the film, shrieking at her for no apparent reason other than she's in this forest. Indeed, the film leeches out any respect for Japanese folklore or the symbolic significance that this forest has for many people, making it just another space in which dumb Americans can get lost. The ending of this film is such utter nonsense, that I'm tempted to just spoil it for everyone. Alas, I don't write those kind of reviews, and maybe this film was wrested away from the director somehow and turned into this sloppy mess which we can now watch at home. Here's hoping. If you are a Nathalie Dormer fan, I highly recommend the sadly canceled
The Fades instead.
