THE FOREST

Starring: Natalie Dormer, Taylor Kinney, Yukiyoshi Ozawa

Writers: Ben Ketai, Sarah Cornwell, Nick Antosca

Director: Jason Zada

When Jess (Dormer) goes missing in the Aokigahara Forest, twin sister Sara (Dormer) flies out to Japan to search for her. Most of the locals don’t hold out too much hope for Jess as she has ventured into what is known as the Suicide Forest, so chances are she had gone there to take her own life. Sara, however, is sure that Jess is alive and heads into the forest with local guide Michi (Ozawa) and “guy she met in the hotel who wants to help” Aiden (Kinney)…

 

With its spooky setting, and the plentiful warnings in the screenplay about how the forest makes people see and do very bad things indeed, I was rubbing my hands as the prospect of a genuinely chilling experience. By the hour mark, unfortunately, I was rubbing my eyes and trying not to yawn. There’s nothing wrong with giving the audience a deliberate dose of character development and a gradual reveal of the plot’s twists and turns but this really felt like a good idea for a short - or Twilight Zone episode - stretched unwisely to feature length.

 

Not that there are many twists and turns to the plot, which seems more concerned with setting up a succession of cheap, choreographed (not to mention telegraphed) jump scares following the now well-worn and incredibly tiresome quiet-quiet-BANG template. When the movie’s opening jolt is someone thumping the window of a car for a laugh the only way is up and to be fair there are a couple of effective scenes but in general most of the attempts to create a nightmarish atmosphere are lost in a swamp of lower league J-horror creatures springing up close to our heroine when she (but not the audience) least expects them to.

 

That said, this isn’t all bad. It’s certainly competently made and has an excellent lead in Natalie Dormer who manages to hold some level of interest despite the threadbare story. The effects are not overly used and some of the apparitions are reasonably creepy. My main issue is that it took an awfully long time to get where it was going and when it finally did get there I was left thinking “So what?”.

Kinney does what he can with a role that hints at ambiguity in his motivations to assist Sara but just comes across as underwritten. Ozawa's character is the voice of reason so obviously he has to be sidelined so that Sara and Aiden can go places they really shouldn't go and suspect each other of doing things they may or may not have done.

For an undemanding audience, or new viewers to the genre, The Forest may just about deliver in terms of scares but seasoned horror veterans may quickly become bored with its programmed shocks and will struggle to find any legitimately horrifying moments. Both Dormer and Zada deserve better.

Yes! Got through the whole review without mentioning how slow Sara is to "twig" what's going on, or about how Natalie Dormer has "branched out" into other genres...