For the Trees

I queued up The Forest (2016) because it's about Aokigahara Forest, Japan's famous suicide forest. We have actually driven through there, with some work colleagues. One explained the forest to us in a little speech in English that sounded like a memorized monologue: "This is Aokigahara Forest. Many people come here every year to kill themselves..." She repeated it a few times word-for-word, as a joke or party trick. That's about how seriously we took the forest.

This movie stars Natalie Dormer. She discovers that her troubled twin sister has gone into the suicide forest and has not returned for two days. The Japanese she talks to on the phone seem to be respecting her assumed desire to die. Her fiance, on the other hand, thinks she's just acting out, doing it for a goof. But Dormer heads to Japan to investigate. 

She has a number of bad dreams (fake-out scares) and creepy encounters in Japan. When she goes to the school where her sister taught English, the students freak out, because she looks like the teacher they thought was dead. When she goes to the forest and stays at the same hotel her sister stayed at, she is attacked by/bumps into a screaming hag/disoriented elderly woman. She asks about her sister at a ranger station, and the smiling clerk takes her to the underground morgue to check out the latest batch of recovered dead. (Her sister is not among them.)

But she also meets another America (Taylor Kinney) in the hotel bar. He asks if her knows her, and she thinks he might have met her sister. But it was just a line, he tells her, to get talking with a cute girl. When she tells him the story, he offers to take her into the forest with a guide. He's a journalist and would like to use her experience for a story.

So they head out, with guide Yukiyoshi Ozawa, who warns them sternly about getting lost. They find many creepy things, like threads leading into the woods that people left to help locate their corpses. They also run into at least one corpse. They also find tents - Ozawa says that people who bring tents are still thinking it over. Finally they find her sisters tent - but not her sister. 

Since it's getting dark, Ozawa and Kinney want to head back, and return in the morning. But Dormer insists on staying. Kinney reluctantly stay as well. Now we get to the horror part.

The myth is that evil spirits live in the forest and try to deceive you into killing yourself. Dormer meets a smiling schoolgirl who tells her not to trust Kinney. And he hasn't been exactly forthcoming - although his deception seems to be in aid of him getting to know a cute girl. But what if he did know her sister? What if he had something to do with her disappearance? What if he is actually holding her somewhere! 

This actually sounds a bit better than it probably is. The movie starts with a lot of jumbled time, mixing the twins youth (in an actually funny scene of the death of their parents), Dormer with her fiance and Dormer getting to Japan. This approach fades out in the forest, and what you get is a lot of jump scares fading into full hallucinated freakouts. Dormer's character is sort of odd - monomaniac in her belief that her twin is alive and in trouble, but also enjoying a little flirty time with Kinney, without a thought to her fiance at home. I only really liked her when she stupidly insists on staying in the forest overnight against all common sense. Shows backbone.

I guess I saw enough reviews going in not to expect much. Ms. Spenser was pretty disappointed.