By Ben Bussey
Taking a real-life location which – in living memory – has been the site of numerous suicides, and then using it as the setting for a horror movie, always felt like a very risky proposition. Had a Hollywood movie opted to produce a similar treatment of the English town of Brigend*, which infamously saw a slew of suicides in recent years, then I would fully expect our reactionary press to be well and truly up in arms – and it would probably mark a rare instance of me largely agreeing with them. Factor in that this is a movie which takes a Japanese setting but centres on American characters, with all locals very much pushed to the sidelines, and you’re left with a movie with a great potential to offend.
Curious, then, that The Forest winds up so utterly inoffensive on just about every level.
Actually, who am I kidding? No, it isn’t curious it all. It’s par for the course in contemporary mainstream horror: take a potentially spooky subject matter, play it out in a neat and tidy fashion with emotions largely dialed down, hope this translates to slow-burn tension, then throw in a few jump-scares complete with gratuitous CGI augmentation just to remind the audience they’re watching a horror movie. That’s how it’s been on so many bland, unmemorable genre entries to hit the multiplexes these past fifteen years or so, and that’s how it will doubtless be on many more in the years ahead. While the key players in The Forest may be coming at it with good intentions, they have not made a film that rises above the quagmire.
Like so many supernatural horror movies with aspirations toward serious drama, The Forest largely hinges on the audience accepting the existence of paranormal forces: not necessarily ghosts as such, but some kind of psychic energies influencing the minds of the characters. First off, we have to accept that old chestnut about a special link between twins. Sarah (Natalie Dormer) flies out to Japan on learning that her sister Jess (also Dormer, of course) has vanished in Aokigahara forest. Just about everyone tells her to abandon all hope; that those who go into Aokigahara generally don’t come back out, either by circumstance or intent. But Sarah won’t listen, insisting that she would know if her sister was already dead. Originally planning to head into the forest alone, she meets a fellow American – travel writer Aiden (Taylor Kinney) – who convinces her to instead go with him and his friend Michi (Yukiyoshi Ozawa), a forest ranger. Michi warns Sarah that, quite aside from being a dangerous place to life and limb, the forest also has a way of playing tricks on the mind, and that if she sees something bad it almost certainly isn’t real. But will they know the difference when the time comes?
Speaking of seeing something bad… well alright, to be fair The Forest is not without its strengths. Natalie Dormer makes for a compelling lead actress, the Serbian forest locations which double for Aokigahara are striking in both their beauty and fearfulness, and director Jason Zada does a good job of capturing the power of both. Beyond this, though, The Forest really struggles to maintain interest. As might have been anticipated, the film plays heavily on ambiguity; whilst Dormer encounters surreal and ghostly visions, it’s never made clear whether or not these things are just going on in her head. This same path has been trod by so many movies in recent years that it simply isn’t effective any more. The same goes for the attempts at building tension between Sarah and her new friends, who she grows to mistrust as they sink deeper into the forest.
The film stumbles into far too many mainstream pitfalls; whilst it’s ostensibly a tale of grief and the struggle to overcome past trauma, it also seems needlessly preoccupied with glamorous travelogue elements. Considering Sarah’s meant to be in her rush to get to her sister, it seems highly gratuitous that we have scenes of her checking into a luxurious Tokyo hotel room overlooking the city, a feeble attempt at comic relief when she sits down for a sushi dinner, and chilling out in the tourist-friendly bar where she meets Aiden. I can’t help but thinking the filmmakers felt obliged to add a bit of Tokyo tourist board material to make up for the fact that the movie is ultimately exploiting the very real tragic history of a Japanese location – whilst at the same time putting American characters at the centre of the tragedy, because western audiences wouldn’t give a shit otherwise, obviously.
It’s not too surprising that The Forest was the brainchild of producer David Goyer: as writer-director of 2009’s The Unborn, he’s demonstrated a knack for squandering talented people on bland material. Not to mention, considering how Odette Yustman was treated there, Natalie Dormer should count herself lucky there isn’t a camera fixed directly on her arse the whole movie; credit to Zada for not going the obvious cheesecake route. Much as it was hard to watch The Unborn without wondering what the hell Gary Oldman was doing there, it’s hard to watch The Forest without feeling bad for Natalie Dormer. She’s clearly got real leading lady potential, and she does her best with what’s given to her – but that really isn’t much at all. It’s roles like these that give the genre such a bad name among ambitious actors, filling them with anxiety about making ‘just horror’ films.
I certainly hope it will be onwards and upwards for both Dormer and Zada from here, as I’m confident both are capable of great work. But I strongly suspect this will be a film that both the actress and the director would rather forget in years to come – much as I suspect anyone who heads out to see it will struggle to remember anything about it a week later.
The Forest is in cinemas now, via Icon Film Distribution.
* A 2015 movie was made on that subject, entitled Bridgend. There have also been two other western films made about Aokigahara: 2013’s Grave Halloween, and Gus Van Sant’s as-yet unreleased Sea of Trees. (I haven’t seen any of them.)