The Forest (2016)

United States of America

Horror, Thriller, Mystery

Lava Bear, AI Film, Phantom Four

Natalie Dormer, Eoin Macken, Stephanie Vogt, Osamu Tanpopo, Yasuo Tobishima, Ibuki Kaneda

Jason Zada

Ben Ketai, Nick Antosca, Sarah Cornwell

Taglines: Everyone comes here looking for a way out

suicide attempt, supernatural, childhood trauma, female protagonist, tokyo, japan, identical twin, lost in the woods, sister sister relationship, mount fuji, aokigahara, haunted forest

Set in the Aokigahara Forest, a real-life place in Japan where people go to end their lives. Against this backdrop, a young American woman comes in search of her twin sister, who has mysteriously disappeared.

Reviews:

Author: skyezero
I would rather peel a raw onion and squeeze the juices into my eyes than watch recent horror movies coming out of Hollywood at the moment. WHY DO YOU STILL HAVE NO IMAGINATION AND JUST RELY ON CHEAP SHITTY JUMP SCENES WITH WANK PLOTS?! Okay. GRR. Random lady gets a casual phone call advising her sister has gone into the suicide forest and it’s been 48 hours so she’s presumed as a suicide and they’re not going to look for her. Absolutely fuck all background into any character at this point so I don’t know them from Adam. The twin sister goes out to find her sister in Japan and instead of heading right to the mission, goes for some sushi and is that arsed about her quest is more bothered that the fish she’s been given is raw. Fuck off. In her dreams she sees a ghoul child in her tent which is cheap jump #1 and to me, fuck all relevance to the audience as we still have no background which to me, is vital when you want someone to be truly on the edge wondering what’s happening. Obviously the main as a blonde, her twin who’s gone to apparently kill herself is dark haired and gothic looking as we clearly don’t want to be too stereotypical do we. Flashbacks contain her sister giving her a vase and saying “Grandpa’s in there” so blondie opens it, revealing he is not and laughs heartily. What a laugh. She finally starts having a deek for her sister at a local place (no idea what it was as I had sort of switched off by this point) and the woman indicates her sister is downstairs. Blondie walks down to the basement of corpses and in true fashion to what we see so far is more offended by the smell than the fact her sister could be one of the rotting deceased found in the forest. Surprised she’s not taking a fucking selfie at this point. She meets a guy in a bar and after telling him her life story ignites a “cheers” over a beverage, cheers to what love? The fact your twin is probably hanging off a tree? He ends up taking her into the forest with an experienced ranger, after a painful journey (for me not them) they find sisters tent and she wants to stay, fair enough. She’s happy to find the tent…. alarm bells. An empty tent in the suicide forest, are you thick? When she sees her first shit ghoul, she tells the guy who she was warned off (cassanova from the bar) in a dead dramatic way, “I saw this girl last night…” as she clicked cassanova was who she was warned off the best she could come up with when he said “what did she say?” was “she said something in japanese.” Seriously. SERIOUSLY. You could have made up something like, she wanted to knife me and fuck the remains. The rest of the movie is probably too pitch black to see anything as they’ve gone for the angle of it’s really dark so lets just have random people who look like Chucky pop up occasionally. Ending makes no sense, the plot is incredibly weak and I am angered yet again by the sheer shit that’s being released onto cinema at the moment. Aokigahara is interesting, it’s real and in reality; fucking terrifying. How can you mess up this movie so badly? No. 2/10