Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on January 8, 2016, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
It’s not long after the lead characters have ventured into the eponymous, mysterious setting of The Forest that the movie reveals a direction it could, and should, have taken.
That locale is Japan’s Aokigahara forest, a lush, 14-square-mile expanse below Mount Fuji whose unfortunate claim to fame lies in being one of the most popular suicide sites in the world. People even venture there with tents in which to spend their final days, and after he has led a couple of American visitors off the official trail, local guide Michi (Yukiyoshi Ozawa) comes across just such a setup. He leaves Sara (Natalie Dormer) and Aiden (Taylor Kinney) behind to investigate—and leaves us behind too, never to learn of the potentially interesting or dramatic evidence he discovers there.
Perhaps the filmmakers were attempting a sense of decorum regarding whatever poor soul spent his or her final days in that tent, but then this is a movie the hangs its intrigue on Aokigahara’s notorious reputation. Some have criticized The Forest in advance for insensitivity, exploiting the real-life tragedies attendant to the area, though it is not blatantly disrespectful or cavalier in the way it handles the topic. Indeed, it seems rather timid to truly delve into its potentially resonant subject, and tap into the mythology and mindset that feed that infamy. Instead, it uses the “Sea of Trees” to float a conventional tale of yurei (angry spirits) plaguing an outsider who has ventured onto their turf.
Sara does have stronger motivation than most to venture onto the haunted territory: She’s in search of her twin sister Jess (also played by Dormer, with darker hair), who was working in Japan as a teacher and vanished after leading a group of her students into Aokigahara. Already uneasy when she arrives in Tokyo, Sara is further perturbed when she visits Jess’ classroom and some of the girls freak out, mistaking her for her twin’s ghost. That’s an effectively unsettling signposting of the supernatural that Sara’s heading into; less persuasive are the jump-scares involving sudden appearances by Scary Old People that are dropped into the film’s opening act, as if to placate the less patient horror fans in the audience before Sara gets to the forest.
Following a stop at an Aokigahara visitor’s center that doubles as a morgue (uh…really?), Sara meets up with Aiden, a travel-magazine writer who senses a hook for his latest piece in Sara’s plight. Throughout the movie, as the two venture through the woods, Aiden’s trustworthiness remains in question, as do the spooky sights Sara sees—are they real, or is the forest preying on her psyche? One thing’s for sure: A flashback to a tragedy in her past doesn’t square with the way she describes it, meaning there’s a big third-act revelation in the offing—one that’s fairly easy to figure out in advance.
Relating all this may make it sound like there’s more to Sara’s character than there is. Despite having been worked over by three writers (Ben Ketai and novelists Sarah Cornwell and Nick Antosca), the screenplay isn’t nearly as dense as its key location, giving its heroine very little dimension beyond concern for her sister, and her and Aiden little to do for the first half beyond walking through the trees, mouthing banal dialogue. Director Jason Zada, making his feature debut after much advertising experience and the popular interactive horror app Take This Lollipop, makes the most of the imposing scenery (actually filmed in Serbia), and what he can of the standard-issue tropes, which inevitably include a long-haired schoolgirl (Rina Takasaki) who sometimes appears friendly and at others acts ominous and/or sports ghoul makeup.
Dormer also does what she can with what she has to work with, but given that The Forest subjugates the promise of its title “character” to Sara’s personal travails, it’s a shame those don’t rise above genre familiarity. In the end, this story could have been told in any forbidding location with the air of a natural home for the tragically deceased, so forgive me if I close with this admonition: Don’t see The Forest for the trees.
