THE FOREST – The Review

Something bad…..evil, happens in Japan’s Aokigahara Forest, a (real) destination popular for those looking for a scenic place to commit suicide. The sheer bad vibes of those woods have trapped its many victims inside as moldy ghosts that haunt people who dare enter. Such ghost stories are common in every storytelling culture, of course, but the Japanese have a long tradition of taking vengeful spirits seriously, in life as well as in art. THE FOREST, a new Hollywood film set in this foggy Japanese woodland is basically a haunted house film, replacing the house with a forest, but despite one or two mild scares, it never generates much tension and is only notable for being the first lousy horror film of 2016 (I’m sure there will be more).

 THE FOREST tells the story of young American Sara Price (Natalie Dormer) who receives word that her identical twin sister Jess (also played by Miss Dormer, but with darker hair), a teacher working in Japan, has disappeared after a visit to the Aokigahara Forest. Convinced Jess is still alive, Sara travels to the land of the rising sun alone to search for her. After a disturbing visit to the forest’s visitor’s center, she meets hunky Aiden (Taylor Kinney), an American writer for an Australian travel magazine, who just happens to be touring Aokigahara with a guide (Yukiyoshi Ozawa) the next day so Sara offers to tag along. Distrust, screaming ghosts, paranormal shenanigans, and boredom ensue.

THE FOREST doesn’t add up to much. The story is underdeveloped, and the characters underwritten. The film doesn’t know what to do once it lays out its initial premise, falling back to the clichés of most PG-13 horror flicks – rotting specters suddenly appearing where there was just open space, ghostly whispering, loads of cheesy jump-scare shocks, and it all ends on a lazy, unresolved note. Sara and Liam spend long stretches trekking through the woods talking about themselves and reciting by-the-numbers dialog like “If we keep walking in this direction, we’ll come to the path before too long” and “I’m here to find my sister and I’m not leaving without her!” and “That’s weird! Why is that happening?” They walk and hike and walk some more, stumbling across the occasional dead body that may or may not really be there while the viewer waits for something to happen, like a bear attack or a naked Nick Nolte, to liven things up. First-time director Jason Zada fails to create any atmosphere or sense of dread and there’s rarely any payoff to the build-up – just when the movie seems on the verge of becoming truly scary, Zada cuts away to a new scene and begins the process over again.  The movie is so full of inconsistencies and plot holes that I stumbled out of THE FOREST with few answers, and many questions: Are there really so many suicides in Aokigahara that the visitor’s center there needs its own morgue? How did Sara’s boyfriend Rob (Eoin Macken) suddenly arrive in Japan (a 20-hour flight from the US) to join the rescue party? Do identical twins really have identical facial moles? Is this the first horror film with a haunted Viewmaster?

THE FOREST doesn’t even work as a travelogue of Japanese spiritual beliefs. Instead of opening the film by showing a suicide there, the background on Aokigahara Forest is described by dialog in a phone call (how cinematic!). By having a bunch of Americans in the cast, led by Miss Dormer (who does her best), THE FOREST  could have taken the opportunity to educate us ignorant gaijin more about, say, yūrei (angry spirits) or Ubasute (taking the elderly to a remote place to die), or the noble history of spirits in religion and art. Instead, the visually uninteresting story might as well be set in Denver, though it adds the weird subtext of Americans being terrified by wet-haired teenage Japanese girls – a theme exhausted a decade ago in films like THE GRUDGE and RING. THE FOREST plays like one of those American remakes of a better Japanese horror film even though it’s not, which is too bad. At least then we’d have the superior original.

1 1/2 of 5 Stars