Even though we’re currently deep into award-season celebrating the best films of 2015, a period of non-stop kudos that will last for another good month and a half, the new year has already begun revealing the titles it has to offer. The very first film of 2016 is supernatural horror thriller The Forest — and, while it’s no embarrassment, it has zero chance of being remembered at this time next year.
The premise is actually fairly interesting, with the potential to be genuinely creepy. Sara Price (Natalie Dormer, Game of Thrones) is a young woman who travels to Japan after her twin sister Jess disappears in Aokigahara Forest, a popular site to commit suicide in the country. Confident that Jess would not kill herself, Sara ventures deep into the forest — accompanied only by Aiden (Taylor Kinney), a handsome journalist she meets at a bar near the forest, and Michi (Yukiyoshi Ozawa), a local guide — determined to find her sister and bring her home. Their quest is not so simple, however. Legend has it, you see, that the forest is haunted by yūrei, the angry spirits of those who have died among its trees, and that it exploits people’s sadness by causing them to have deadly hallucinations. As she searches for Jess, Sara comes face to face with not only the ghosts of the forest, but also those of her past, as she finally confronts the family trauma that the twins experienced together as children.
Now, Aokigahara is a real forest outside Tokyo that lies at the base of Mount Fuji, and dozens of bodies are retrieved from within it each year. The site, also known as the “Suicide Forest” and the “Sea of Trees”, is historically Japan’s most popular place to commit suicide — to the extent that there are signs at the head of the trail urging hikers to think of their families and contact a suicide-prevention hotline. As possibly the creepiest place in the world, Aokigahara would seem to be the perfect setting for a horror film. The Forest, alas, never uses its disturbing real-life location to the terrifying effect it could have.
First-time director Jason Zada is a competent, but thus far mostly uninspired, filmmaker. Once the film’s characters are deep in the forest, The Forest is just not eventful — or scary! — enough to succeed as a horror movie. Sara and Aiden spend a lot of time walking through the woods looking for Jess, but actual scary moments come rarely — and, when they do, they’re little more than the typical jump-scares that you’d expect from a movie like this. Being in Aokigahara, and knowing that hundreds of unhappy people have killed themselves right there, should be enough all on its own to give proceedings a sense of unbearable dread, but that type of tension isn’t there. The result is that, instead of delivering the chilling horror movie that marketing materials promised, filmmakers have made a film that feels more like a psychological family drama… with evil nasty things that sometimes arbitrarily jump out at you.
Dormer is a talented lead actress and quite good here in dual roles that give her an opportunity to show off her range, though perhaps the film’s hair and makeup department helps her differentiate between the two rather too enthusiastically — Sara is blonde and fresh-faced, while Jess has black hair and edgy makeup, so there’s never any doubt about which twin Dormer is playing at any given time. I almost wish that the filmmakers had allowed her to build the contrast between the twins through her performance alone; that’s the kind of acting challenge that I appreciate, and it would have made Dormer’s performance(s) that much more impressive.
Kinney, best-known for his role on NBC’s procedural drama Chicago Fire, has never struck me as an actor overflowing with personality. Nevertheless, he gives an enjoyably disquieting performance as a mystery man who may or may not have sinister motives — and whose unreadable expressions can thus be interpreted in multiple ways at once. Rina Takasaki, in little more than a cameo, gives perhaps my favourite performance in the film as a schoolgirl that Sara encounters in her quest who may have information about Jess’s whereabouts. With one excellent facial expression after another, Takasaki will surely be the element of the film I remember most vividly as time goes on.
The film ultimately has too little to say about these characters’ lives. There’s nothing at all on the page to develop them — the writing team of Nick Antosca, Sarah Cornwell, and Ben Ketai are focused entirely on a single traumatic event from the past that has completely dominated Sara’s and Jess’s lives. Their present, though? Unknown. Sara may as well not even have a life to go back to; aside from having a vague love interest (Eoin Macken) who never registers as a character, Sara doesn’t seem to exist beyond her quest to find Jess. Oh, and viewers are supposed to accept as fact that twins have a psychic connection and can always tell if the other is in trouble.
To be fair, The Forest does hint at having something substantial on its mind about the way a shared trauma can shape people’s lives and forever inform the relationship they have with each other. For Jess and Sara, their experience of this past event differed in one small and yet huge way. It comes down to the difference between being inside a room and being right outside the door, and it completely determines how each of the two people grows and develops, always together yet always apart. Sara and Jess are identical twins who are exactly the same in so many ways, but fundamentally different in the only way that matters. The Forest without question reaches for this thematic depth, and it almost gets there — but the filmmakers never develop this quite far enough, and the characterizations of Jess and Sara are never illuminating enough for it to mean much. Nevertheless, one character’s obsession with coming to terms with this childhood trauma leads to unexpectedly sad (perhaps inevitable) consequences — until the filmmakers cheapen it with a shameless horror-movie cliché in the film’s final frame.
What The Forest does very well, at least, is destabilize Sara’s certainty of what is real and what is not when she is deep in the forest. Outrageous hallucinations are often presented as so mundane and naturalistic, the deadly impulses so logical and necessary, that the viewer quickly begins to question whether what’s happening on-screen can be trusted. When these sequences occur, they are disorienting in the best possible way and the only times the film threatens to live up to its full potential. The rest of the time, The Forest is a work of frustrating (but well-intentioned) mediocrity. Yes, the ambition is evident. This is a film with something meaningful on its mind. Unfortunately, it just never figures out how to say what that is.
