Review #69: The Forest (2016)

This review was originally written in October 2019.

October Horror Movie Review #17: The Forest

The first thing I want to say is that this movie feels like it should be right up my alley. A movie about Aokigahara, the Suicide Forest? Sign me up! However, this movie makes some missteps (specifically, one misstep it makes over and over) that unfortunately keep it from being great.

The Forest is about a girl who travels to Japan in search of her twin sister who lives there (?) and has recently gone missing. She finds out her sister went into Aokigahara, the spooky forest where people go to commit suicide, so our protagonist ignores all warnings and goes off anyway. Unfortunately for her, the spooky forest has some spooks and scares in store, and she just might have to come face-to-face with her haunting past in the process...

The first thing that struck me about this film is how cavalier the main character is about all of the people's warnings; despite the fact that her sister has been missing in this giant forest for five days and the only people who go there are people contemplating suicide, our protagonist simply doesn't care. Nothing can dissuade her from searching for her sister. That in and of itself isn't a problem, but I couldn't help but feel like the writers wanted us to hear all of these people's warnings and internally add in, "Silly Japanese, your legends mean nothing to us Americans." Like, when one man urges her not to go off on her own, she asks if he has a family, and how he would react if his children had gone off into the forest- ignoring the fact that in this man's culture, people DO go off into the forest, and their families don't always go charging off after them. I just feel like this is one of many examples of a piece of fiction where the protagonist ignores everyone else's values and beliefs, and it's all shrugged off with as if it should be obvious. And this is usually done in fiction where the protagonist is a "normal" person in a foreign land.

But that's just a minor problem, all told. A bigger problem is that despite having an interesting setting and keeping me interested for nearly all of it, this movie really takes its time getting to the action. It was almost an hour into this movie's runtime before I felt like we were beginning to get into the really spooky and mysterious stuff.

Speaking of which, here's a BIG PROBLEM with this movie: It doesn't trust its viewers. I guarantee someone in the editing room was like, "I don't think viewers are going to know this scene is spooky. Let's add a jump scare." This movie has WAY TOO MANY JUMP SCARES and they're so obvious you'll see them coming a mile away. Guys, stop interrupting a genuinely creepy scene by a quick movement and a loud noise. The creepy scene was creepy until you shook your keys in front of my face, and then it's just stupid.

This movie has lots of parts that were genuinely terrifying, and those parts were all incredibly slow and incredibly quiet. The scene where they're on the trail and Ms. Protagonist thinks that they're going in the wrong direction, and Mr. Guy points out the direction of the river- and the river has seemingly changed direction!? Terrifying! And not a single jump scare in there! The schoolgirl walking around the forest at night was creepy too- but the jump scare with the three ghost women? Not at all creepy. Here's a pro tip from someone who watches lots of movies and loves horror: FINDING A VIEWMASTER CONTAINING PICTURES OF YOUR PARENTS' DEATH IN A CAVE IN THE FOREST IS ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING. Adding a ghoul to jump out at the end of it is NOT TERRIFYING. You took something that was honestly one of the scariest moments I have seen in a film in quite a long time and you MADE IT NOT SCARY BY TRYING TO MAKE IT SCARY. It is clear that they did not trust the audience to go X number of minutes without a jump scare so they added one in.

Finally, unless I missed something, the resolution of the sister plotline comes out of literally nowhere and it seriously confused me at first, but I did like the twist or whatever you can call it at the end. (However, because again, the director didn't trust the audience, there's one last jump scare right in the last two seconds before the credits. Come on guy, you're actively making your movie worse!) Overall the ending worked as well as it could, I suppose.

So I did like this movie, but COME ON. Trust your audience. Get to the good stuff a little bit faster. You had a great starting point and it would have been even better without so many steps backward.

Overall rating: 6.5/10

How I Would Change the Movie: Have it turn out that Aiden didn't actually stay the night; he was a figment of the forest all along. (I actually thought this was what was happening for most of the film, but that's because I didn't realize there were two white men in this movie. I thought they were the same person, and frankly, it made for a better movie.)