'The Forest' Movie Review
After seeing the trailers for 'The Forest' and then reading some critic reviews as well as checking Rotten Tomatoes scores, I had written this movie off as one that I might check out on home video. My expectations were pretty low, which can actually be a good thing: if the movie sucks, I'm prepared, but if it's good it'd be a pleasant surprise.
The film starts out with the main character of Sara (Natalie Dormer) searching for her identical twin sister, Jess, who has gone missing in the Aokigahara Forest in Japan where she currently lives. The forest, nicknamed the "suicide forest", is a palce where Japanese residents go to commit suicide, leaving their bodies for park rangers to find (yes, this is actually a real thing).
Seeking a guide to take her into the forest, Sara enlists the help of Aiden (Taylor Kinney), a reporter
writing for an Australian news outlet. Aiden resides in Tokyo and is fluent in Japanese and knows a guide to aid Sara. With the help of her two new allies in Aiden and Michi, they explore the forest until they come across Jess's tent. Intent on finding her sister, Sara refuses to leave and return in the morning, not heeding all of the warnings locals have given her about the strange happenings of what goes on in the forest. People are haunted by spirits of the dead, causing them great paranoia and hallucinations and ultimately causing their suicides.
Sara and Aiden stay the night, but Sara's ghostly visitors lead her away from camp and start to wreak havoc on her psyche. Becoming evermore paranoid, Sara begins to distrust Aiden, believing that he knew Jess and had a part to play in her disappearance.
Sara eventually escapes from Aiden and continues her search for Jess, encountering more spirits and losing her sanity in the process. After falling into an underground cave and more paranormal experiences, Aiden rescues Sara and they happen upon an abandoned ranger station Aiden had found, piquing Sara's distrust of Aiden even more. After a struggle, Sara winds up stabbing and killing Aiden. As Sara is traveling through the forest, she sees Jess and goes after her, but Jess is equally as paranoid and runs off.
The backstory of Sara and Jess goes into the death of their parents, initially told to be a drunk driving accident, but we are shown that their father killed their mother and himself. Jess saw their bodies but Sara didn't, which caused Jess's troubled upbringing and multiple suicide attempts.
In a scene where Sara thinks her father is trying to kill her, she pries his hand off of her arm with a knife. Jess manages to escape the forest and finds the help of authorities that have been searching for her, including Sara's boyfriend Rob. Sara is revealed to actually have slit her own wrist when trying to escape the illusion of her father, and is then pulled into the ground by multiple arms coming our of the earth. As Jess and the authorities postpone their search for the night, Michi looks back into the forest one last time and sees the ghastly apparition of a now deceased Sara.
While this movie wasn't all that scary, the tension ran high throughout and the constant paranoia made for an uneasy watching experience. Because my expectations were so low for this film, I wound up enjoying it more than I thought I would.
My rating: 6 out of 10
