Films slated in January are usually not the cream of the crop. It is a cold time of year and far enough away from any joyous holiday that it typically keeps audiences away in droves. People seem just a little too busy to sit down and take in the newest from Tinsel Town. But the theaters have to have some type of product that is original. One does not expect much of a film in the post-Oscar push, and THE FOREST fits that low expectation bill.
The story starts out with a woman named Sara (Natalie Dormer), shaken awake by something in her lower conscious. She senses that something is wrong with her twin sister Jess (also played by Natalie Dormer). Jess has been living in Japan to start a new life. Sara finds that Jess has disappeared in a local Japanese forest. It is an area known as a death forest, a place where people are killed by spirits. Sara can feel that Jess is very much alive and she travels halfway around the world to look for her sister. She soon finds that no one will go into the dense underbrush to look for the young woman. All the locals sense the sadness in Sara.
Eventually Sara meets an Australian man who decides to take her into the woods. They go into the forest with a local guide who looks for the dead who have committed suicide or may have died by the spirits. The guide seems afraid of the forest. The three go off the path, something they were warned not to do. They stumble on to the campsite of Jess. Sara decides to stay at the site in case Jess returns. The guide warns her not to be in the forest after the sun goes down. Sara ignores the advice but her Aussie hunk and decides to stay with the young lady. That’s when strange happenings begin to appear in the night.
The film is very much a mixed bag. Parts of the production work and others do not. In the working column has to be Natalie Dormer, an actress required to play twin sisters. She has to do a split screen with herself while being two distinct individuals. It is much harder to do than one would think and the young actress delivers it with an amazing strength. Not for an instant does anyone believe that they are the same person. The problem is that the character she plays is not a likable one. As an audience, we never feel any empathy for the young woman and the struggle she has to partake. The more the film goes along, the more we want her dead. Main characters should be sympathetic ones and the way that Sara is written is not in that tradition.
Which brings us to the biggest problem with the film – it feels like it is melded from about half dozen flicks from the 1990s Japanese horror boom. And all of the former films are better than THE FOREST. In scene after scene, the audience will likely keep thinking “Didn’t we see that before?” When moviegoers sense that kind of déjà vu, it is not a good sign. The three writers should have crafted something more original. Another of the problems with the film is in the rating. A PG-13 assignment reeks of not being a successful horror flick. Everyone knows that the best of the modern era genre flicks are rated R. PG-13 means that there will be little blood and even less gore. Also, the writers fail to bring some true horror to the work. There are a few jolt scares but the final film is not horror, at times bordering on horrible.
Director Jason Zada does a great job with his limited material. He captures the spookiest elements of thick green woods while still keeping it beautiful. His vision of this world borders on perfection but he just needed something better to work with and not the screenplay that he was handed. To sum up, THE FOREST is one of those ‘check your brain at the door’ kind of flicks. It is a disposable film, one meant to entertain and not do much more. In that idea it is not a bad motion picture, just not a great one.
