The Forest and all the images you see in this review are owned by Gramercy Pictures and Icon Film Distribution
Directed by Jason Zada
No point in putting it off any longer! It’s time to watch a January movie. Not an Oscar film that didn’t deign to show itself to the public until after the new year such as The Revenant or The Hateful Eight. Nope. One of this REALLY terrible movies that comes out during the worst month of the year because it couldn’t hack it against the movies that come out any other time of the year. The month that brought us The Devil’s Due, Blackhat, and Texas Chainsaw 3D is now bring forth one of its 2016 sacrificial lambs in the form of The Forest. Yeah… this movie doesn’t have a whole lot going for it, especially considering it’s set in Japan yet manages to still have a mostly white case. It still COULD be a surprise gem, right? Probably not, but let’s find out!!
The movie follows Sara Price (Natalie Dormer) as she goes to Japan to find her sister who has recently disappeared in the Aokigahara Forest. If you’re not aware, the forest is at the base of Mount Fuji and is famous for being a place that people go to commit suicide. The details are a bit unclear, but it sounds like Sara’s sister Jess (also played by Natalie Dormer) became a teacher when she got to Japan despite being portrayed as unreliable and struggling with demons of some sort and she got lost on a field trip to Mount Fuji. The police aren’t gonna do shit to find her because they assume she’s dead already, so Sara finds another white person in Japan named Aiden (Taylor Kinney) who knows someone that patrols the forest looking for people and corpses. So Sara, Aiden, and the park guide Michi (Yukiyoshi Ozawa) head into the forest to find her and anyone else who hasn’t offed themselves yet. Now this is where things get a bit confusing because Sara starts seeing visions and ghosts, but as far as I can tell she’s the ONLY person here who’s being affected by these spirits. It seems like everyone else who comes in here just kills themselves with ghostly intervention, but I guess they were all waiting for the blonde lady to show up. Will she be able to find her sister despite all the creepy shenanigans happening around her? Does Aiden have a dark past that could possibly put everyone in danger? What the fuck was Michi thinking taking these untrained dumb asses into the forest with him!?
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