The Forest | Review

For the Trees: Zada’s Moody Locale Squandered by Feeble Narrative

We’ve come to expect studios to unbosom their less desirable horror trinkets during the dawning of every new year, and the annual tradition is alive and well with the equivocally titled The Forest from first time director Jason Zada. On a positive note, it’s a return to more traditional formatting, a move away from the found footage items we usually find released in this quarter (The Devil Inside; Devil’s Due), and it’s also not a remake or a dubious sequel (The Last Exorcism Part II). But Zada’s film is the second English language film revealed over the past year to waste its singularly spooky locale, Japan’s Aokigahara Forest at the base of Mt. Fuji (the first being Gus Van Sant’s Cannes blooper, Sea of Trees, which may explain this horror film’s demure appellation). A familiar set up transposed to a promisingly unfamiliar environment can’t quite maintain the unnerving climate necessary to make this interesting, while a trio of co-writers including Nick Antosca, Sarah Cornwell, and Ben Ketai (who directed the Jeff Fahey thriller Beneath, which also concerns a group of folks going insane when trapped in mother nature’s clutches) rely on a variety of spooky and psychological clichés.

Sara (Natalie Dormer) has just received a phone call from Japan informing her of the possible suicide of her twin sister, Jess (also Dormer). It seems Jess was last seen walking into the Aokigahara Forest, a place where people go to kill themselves. Dropping everything, despite the protestations of her husband Rob (Eoin Macken), Sara hops on the next flight to Japan and hustles to the Mt. Fuji where she befriends an Australian journalist, Aiden (Taylor Kinney), who offers to trek through the forest with a suicide watch forest guide, Michi (Yukiyoshi Ozawa). But when Sara stumbles upon Jess’ abandoned tent, she insists on staying the night in the forest in case her sister returns.

The notable likeability of performer Natalie Dormer, best known for the series “Game of Thrones” and as a minor character in The Hunger Games franchise, is hampered by the silliness of the screenplay. Too much of the narrative relies on the assumedly intense bond between twins, a popular genre trope so repetitively bludgeoned into the screenplay that the rationale characterization of Dormer’s Sara seems increasingly (and laughably) neurotic. When she’s not making distracting statements, Dormer is allowed to provide evidence of her screen presence, existing somewhere on a malleable continuum between the blonde vacuousness of Kate Hudson and the apprehensive emotion of Saoirse Ronan.

Since this is told from a staunchly American perspective, nearly all the Japanese characters are portrayed as histrionic, menacing, or ridiculously superstitious. The intriguing exposition regarding Aokigahara Forest (following a campy interaction when Sara makes a surprise visit to her sister’s classroom) promises something more intensely scary, considering it was historically a Ballad of Narayama type abandonment site for the sickly or elderly.

Revealing a number of cheap scares via a combination of ghostly Japanese spirits (who look like molting Kabuki witches) intertwined with Sara’s severe psychological trauma (which also seems questionable once purposefully vague details are confirmed), makes The Forest feel like a horror film running on empty. Co-star Taylor Kinney manages a nice blend of menace and sympathy as the film attempts to balance doubt on Sara’s sanity vs. Aiden’s murky intentions. But the characters in The Forest suffer from the usual lack of logic, purposefully and willfully flung in harm’s way for the benefit of the maximum amount of thrill.

Danish DP Mattias Troelstrup (Rebecca Thomas’ Electrick Children and Eva Husson’s Bang Gang) captures plenty of spooky woodsy landscape shots (apparently much of this was filmed in Serbia’s Tara National Forest), but the mood primed with the film’s visuals is trampled by the narrative’s commitment to the obvious.

★★/☆☆☆☆☆