A woman goes into Japan's Suicide Forest to find her twin sister, and confronts supernatural terror. (Source-Imdb.com)
The Forest Trailer- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hW8hUcXR-A
Let me begin by saying that seeing the trailer for this film had me completely pumped up to see the movie in theaters! This story was very intriguing and it centers around the real life environment of the Aokigahara Forest, also known as either the Sea of Trees or the Suicide Forest.
The Aokigahara Forest is located at the base of Mt. Fuji and is infamously known for being on par with California's Golden Gate Bridge as being one of the most popular destinations for people to commit suicide.
People who walk into the forest usually go there for only one reason...there has only be a very small minority that would rather venture for something else, that being to recover deceased bodies.
It has been said that the forest was used for, 'Ubasute' which according to mentalfloss.com means, "...A brutal form of euthanasia that translates roughly to "abandoning the old woman."" It was an uncommon practice back thousands of years ago where when families were lacking food, they take their elderly family members to the forest and leave them to die in order to reduce the amount of mouths needed to be fed.
While this is considered to some as simply a folklore, it's still a grim backstory that can be seen as true due to the countless claims that the forest has been haunted by ghosts-or yūrei-that are vengeful spirits of "those abandoned by Ubasute and mournful spirits of the suicidal" for many years.
The film plays on these beliefs and uses it to their advantage in order to create a thriller/mystery/horror...or did they?
The story stars main character Sara Price, played by Natalie Dormer (also known for her most famous role as Margaery Tyrell from Game of Thrones). She is a woman who is searching for her twin sister, Jess (who is also played by Dormer) who was seen walking into the suicide forest alone during a school trip.
In the first 15 minutes of the movie, Sara is already in Japan. I could tell that the director was trying to spend no time on filler moments and get right to the main plot, although the way it's done makes me see the beginning of the movie as a compilation of quick paced exposition without any depth to them.
First, the audience learns that the sister is missing.
Then, Sara is concerned.
Later, she goes to Japan.
There's not a lot of time to learn more about who she is or even how her fiancé, Rob (Eoin Macken) and her interact. His acting in particular felt strange to hear as well, he sounded too relaxed considering the fact that he knows what Sara is going through and he knows Jess to some degree that he would somewhat care about her disappearance.
Also, when Sara visits Japan, her adventures are also not well-fleshed out, making Japan look as creepy and mean-spirited as the forest itself with a homeless man scaring her in the city, a trio of females mocking her, and a random student screaming at the sight of her.
Now the last one is rightfully explained afterwards, but when it happens, you're just caught off guard. I know we're supposed to be confused as to why a girl would react so strongly to a person, but again, the scenes were so fast. One minute we're at Sara's house just finding out about the lost sister and next she's in a Japanese classroom and a student screams at her.
It's...difficult to explain on here, honestly, but that's a problem I found with the beginning.
Anyways, the student screamed at Sara because she thought she was the ghost of Jess coming back to haunt her. She was apart of the school trip to Mt. Fuji with Jess and witnessed her going into the woods.
With this information, Sara is even more determined to find her sister, but people advise her not to venture in the suicide forest alone. Therefore, she must wait until someone comes to her assistance. Frustrated that no resident would take her into the forest, she drinks at a bar for her first night in Japan. There we're introduced to a young man named Aiden (Taylor Kinney) who sits next to her and tries to flirt with her with a casual pick up line, saying, "Have I seen your before?" Aiden recieved a confusing answering from Sara, who replied with, "4 days ago?" Aiden discovers that Sara was referring to her twin Jess and whether Aiden and Jess met at the bar 4 days before she disappeared.
Aiden seems willing to help Sara find her sister after he learns what is going on, so he invites a Japanese man to be their guide into going into the forest the next day. After walking a while and Sara becoming easily spooked by bumping into a hanging dead body, the trio find a yellow tent that belongs to Jess and Sara is thrilled to see it.
Sara tells the men that she will not leave the sight until her sister returns to the tent. Aiden decides to join her and the Japanese guide hesitantly leaves them behind, advising them not to leave their spot so he can come back for them tomorrow.
I will get more into analyzing while still pointing out important points in the movie. I say this here because interesting fact, while I was writing this, I noticed something...this story has a lot of plot holes.
Starting back with the girl who screamed at Sara earlier. She said she knew Jess and they were on the same field trip to Mt. Fuji together when Jess went into the Suicide forest. But when Sara, Aiden, and the guide try to find her, they only discover her yellow tent (and a line of clothes)
....Why did she have a tent and sets of clothing with her on a field trip?
How did she carry that all on her person? It wasn't an overnight stay...
Fun fact from mentalfloss.com though, it's said that, "...visitors who bring a tent with them are believed to be undecided on their suicide attempt. Some will camp for days, debating their fates." if
this movie was set from Jess' perspective and we see her story about possibly debating over taking her life while having the
spirits torment her to go through with it could've worked and could've gave a
reason to show this fun fact in the film.
Another plot hole I noticed was when Sara and Aiden discussed their relationship with their siblings on the night they stay in the forest. Aiden mentions that he had a younger brother who was very rebellious. Sara says Jess was also a very rebellious person, in fact the two were complete opposites as adults. We get a look into Sara's personality, her being the obedient, polite young woman whereas Jess was more outgoing and a trouble-maker.
Sara tells Aiden that she thinks this Jess gets herself into trouble is because of their childhood trauma, which-shown in flashback-reveals the women as two little girls with their grandma when they hear a loud 'car crash' inside the basement of their home that killed their mom and dad. Jess was the only one who saw the damage and was cursed with that image ever since.
The flashback alone was very eerie, the girls looked like the ones from 'The Shining' with their creepy stares and simultaneously turning their heads to their grandma when they hear two loud bangs.
There was no need for the GIRLS to be scary. But back to the main point, THE PLOT HOLE.
Later on in the film, after Sara has experienced a series of very bizarre things happening in the forest (which I will dig into soon) she falls into a hole and discovers her sister's camera and see skims through the pictures in the camera that reveal the truth behind their parents' death. The 'car crash' that Sara though it was, was actually a murder-suicide where the father shot the mother and then himself in the basement.
First of all, how are those pictures still there? You could argue that this is apart of Sara's mind messing with her and seeing pictures that weren't even there, even the camera could've been fake. Even so, Sara seemed like she didn't know about her father's crime until then.
How can she see things that aren't there? She couldn't have known unless she saw the pictures...
But wait a minute...how did Jess take the picture?! She wouldn't, couldn't and DIDN'T calmly take perfectly clear pictures of her parents dead on the floor when she was a child!
This is screwing with my head...which reminds me, people warned Sara that the forest would lead her to commit suicide by screwing with her head and playing on her emotions. And the forest does exactly that...with JUMP SCARES. CHEAP. JUMP SCARES.
(Actual picture of corpse hanging from a tree in the Suicide Forest)
Being that the location of the film is in a REAL LIFE HORROR SHOW, I would expect better ways to scare your audience that the music swelling up as Sara walks towards a ghost and the ghost opens its mouth and makes an AHH! sound.
People have seen that countless times, and it worked back then when movies became a thing and people we're still trying their hand at how to provoke fear out of their audience. But this is 2016, and we're at a point where we have learned various ways to scare people.
In this case, the best way to scare someone is through phycological horror and doing what you said you would do: play with our minds. Sure, that 'happens', but it doesn't hit home for me. The writers could've done this so much more better than what it showed. Every jump scare, I scoffed or rolled my eyes because it was pathetic and sad, that they would waste this opportunity to incorporate the folklore of the forest or the hype that it's haunted. That's the stuff that I would've loved to learn more about as I followed Sara's journey to find her sister.
Again, I'm not saying that there was no phycological horror in this, there was. Such as the moment nearing the end of the story where Sara discovers that Aiden was lying to her about having a younger brother and plus, he did know Jess well enough that he had a picture of her on his phone.
This leads to Sara freaking out on Aiden and Aiden taking the action to kidnap her in a small cabin where Sara hears a noise behind one of the doors of the cabin and receives a note from under the door that is from Jess. Aiden was the real bad guy and kidnapped Jess...or did he?
At first, I hated how they seemed to make this story all about a bad guy kidnapping women, but after watching the movie, I began to like it. I'm still not sure whether he really knew Jess or that was all apart of Sara's twisted mind. It did seem out of left field for him to be so evil, so I'm going to assume that he didn't know Jess, but even so...
Now that Sara doesn't trust Aiden anymore, she ends up killing him and opens the door that she thinks Jess is behind. All Sara sees in a trip to the past, watching younger Jess looking at their dead parents in the basement. Sara covers younger Jess' eyes as if to protect her and make up for when she couldn't do that back then.
Soon after, The dead father opens his eyes and crawls to Sara, gripping onto her arm. Sara tells him to get away and cuts him off her wrist with a knife. Sara runs away from the cabin but encounters a ghost that she met before. The ghost signals to Sara that she too is now a ghost because she killed herself after has cutting her father metaphorically-but her wrists physically.
She slit her wrists and died in the room where she thought her sister was in and once that's settled in her head, Sara is grabbed by random hands from below and is dragged into the ground, sealing her fate.
Meanwhile, the Japanese guide, some police men, and even Sara's fiancé Rob (who traveled to Japan to look for her) is calling out for Sara when they run into Jess, who-to my surprise- was alive this whole time! She looked panicked and ran into Rob's arms, finally relieved that she was free from the forest while Sara is trapped there forever as an angry yūrei...
Jess being alive surprised the heck of me, but it also brought up more questions.
If she was alive, then where the heck was she? She had a tent and Sara did stay at the tent for most of the night waiting for Jess, so why didn't she return? Did she really not want to die and she was just lost?
Thinking back to my idea of how the story could've went earlier, I strongly believe now that the movie could've been so much better from Jess' perspective.
Think about it...Jess saw her parents dead, and not only that, but fully knew that her father took her mother's life and committed suicide. She had to carry that pain for years and acted out in rebellion because of it. In order to fix her life, she goes to Japan and takes a field trip with her class to Mt. Fuji. But when she learns about the suicide forest, the spirits drive her into the forest and encourage her to kill herself. Part of her wants to to get rid of the pain, but the other half knows it's wrong and still wants to live her life and see the world to get away from her dark past.
Add some better phycological horror and you got yourself a better movie.
The Forest as a whole isn't horrible. There are certainly worse horror movies out there. The acting wasn't too bad, although in the beginning it seems a little monotoned. Dormer has been shown to perform very well in her previous roles, so this is just a small step into larger fame and I'm not worried about her future.
I'm sure the people behind this movie worked very hard to make their audience fearful of the idea of losing control of your sanity, but I personally think it could've worked better from a different view and study more about the backstory of the forest instead of using it just to add a fear factor.
Overall, I wouldn't suggest this to anyone as a MUST SEE movie. But this could be great for a simple night in when you want to feel a little spooked and then forget about it the next day.
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