The Forest 2016 Review…
When Sara’s sister Jess, goes missing in the Suicide Forest she sets out to find her. After being warned not to go into the forest, she goes anyways.
The Forest had so much potential that regrettably never came to be. The scares didn’t work, we’ve all seen them before so none of it comes as a surprise. It’s basically, one of those movies where our protagonist is warned, or given rules to follow and then immediately ignores those rules and then wonders why bad things keep happening.
Almost everyone in The Forest is unsympathetic. Sara’s boyfriend seems like a real douchebag at first. How he lets the women he’s supposed to love basically head off on an expedition all by herself is beyond me? How can the local authorities not be doing more to find Jess? The film goes out of its way, it would seem, to make every character unlikable except for Taylor Kinney’s character Aiden. We like him right him from the start, maybe a little too much and that in itself brings on a certain amount of suspicion that it shouldn’t.
I wanted so much to like this movie. Being a fan of Destination Truth, I knew all about this Haunted Forest or Suicide forest because they show spent an episode there. It is a real place in Japan called the Aokigahara Forest that really lies at the foot of Mount Fuji and many people have gone their to commit suicide. How could the story tellers screw this up so bad?
The movie itself is well made, the acting is respectable but there is just not really anything original here. Even the ending, we see coming a mile away. I have to blame the writing here. As I said, so much potential with the subject matter and The Forest just fails to live up to it.
Natalie Dormer as Sara and Jess Price
Taylor Kinney as Aiden
Eoin Macken as Rob
Stephanie Vogt as Valerie
Yukiyoshi Ozawa as Michi
Rina Takasaki as Hoshiko
Noriko Sakura as Mayumi
Yûho Yamashita as Sakura
James Owen as Peter