Run to the hills . . . Avoid this movie!
A woman (Natalie Dormer) goes into Japan’s Suicide Forest to find her twin sister (Also Natalie Dormer) and confronts supernatural terror.
Dull, boring and laughable. I think Miss Dormer better stick with Game of Thrones. Another intriguing premise thrown down the gutter.
Credit where it is due. Dormer delivered the best performance that she could with the weak characters and cliched dialogue.
I really wanted the film to explore the mystery behind the Aokigahara Forest. Deemed the Suicide Forest. A forest so dense that it shuts out all natural sound. Making it a good site for suicide as no one can hear the acts take place. Believe me, I was freaked out by that paragraph alone on Wikipedia than I was with this movie.
The potential for a dark and psychological thriller squandered and replaced with a generic fright fest with little tension, predictable jumps and a twist you could see coming a mile off. 93 minutes? It felt a whole lot longer than that.
Despite Mattias Troelstrup’s beautifully shot cinematography and the creepy backdrop, The Forest was a coma-inducing bomb. The film flicked back and forth as Dormer’s Sara seeks Dorma’s Jess. The cliched flashbacks with her doppelganger twin were nauseating. Corny and unnecessary. Adding nothing to the mix.
When we weren’t exposed to these flashbacks, we had slow meandering shots of the woods with creepy trinkets popping up combined with lifeless dialogue between one dimensional characters that you couldn’t give two monkeys about.
Yukiyoshi Ozawa did his best to create a little suspense as the forest guide with his chilling ghost stories. Things finally picked up when Jess strayed from the path. A path that Ozawa repeatedly insisted she stayed on. BUT of course, what does she do?
The eeriness surrounding the Forest and the loss of time was a nice gimmick. BUT it never really got going. I could feel my eyes drooping. Reprieved by a few jumpy bits to keep me on my toes. A chance meeting involving a dark hallway in a remote hostel soon woke me out of my slumber. For a brief moment.
Taylor Kinney (Zero Dark Thirty) wasn’t strong enough or creepy enough to create any real threat or interest as the mysterious journalist that Jess meets along the way. The paranoia finally settling in thick and fast. BUT by the end I really didn’t care.
It took too long to get going. And when it did, you really wished you hadn’t bothered. Considering it had a $10 million budget, the effects were dreadful. Random extras popping up with manky fancy dress masks howling stupid noises really didn’t help matters.
And the finale offered a little of what I had expected. BUT it was rushed and far too frenetic. You also realised that the plot didn’t make any sense and the incredibly OTT score by Bear McCreary made it even more comical than it should have been.
A real mess. I’d wait for this to haunt the Horror Channel.
2/5
The MAD MOVIE RANTER 
Agree totally with this. A squandered chance. Though I am still unsure a film set on and around a location so closely linked with recent death as this one is suitable for a movie?
I know what you mean. They exploited a hot spot that really needs delving into. I was hoping that her sister’s disappearance could have tried to attempt to make a comment on it. Nothing more than a sordid selling point to attract film goers (Which guiltily it did).
Pity..the trailer was pretty effective. It seems rather unanimous of strong dislike feelings towards this one. Haha! Great review! 🙂
Thank you very much. If you can catch it for nothing, give it a go. I went in preparing for the worst and . . . it was still pretty bad. I’ve been a fan of Dormer for some time. I was hoping that this would be the perfect showcase for her BUT thankfully she still has GoT to fall back on. At the moment :s
If it lands on Netflix, maybe I’ll check it out! But then, there are endless better choices.
Definitely better choices out there haha!