Delayed Reaction: The Forest

Premise: After her twin sister goes missing, a woman goes to find her in a Japanese forest known for people committing suicide there.

This is one of those horror movies that feels like they exist because an executive read a New Yorker piece about it. It's like the Slender Man movie they made. Some dark topic hits a certain point in the cultural consciousness and someone fast tracks a movie. This is the cynical take, of course. I imagine the screenwriters for this had an idea for a movie about Aokigahara a while ago and were able to finally get it made because of the new studio interest. Regardless, this movie seems to exist because of a topic, not at idea.

I'm too harsh on these "studio horror movies" though. First of all, many of them don't really come from major studios. This one is a Gramercy release*. Second, just because they are PG-13 doesn't mean they can't be scary. The Ring is plenty scary, after all. A movie like The Forest, if made the right way, could be plenty scary. Frankly, when I watched this though, I wasn't looking for something effective. It was late. I wanted to watch a scary movie but without the risk of it causing some fucked up dreams. And that's exactly what I got.

*To be fair, that is a subsidiary of Universal.

The movie is dark. It has some nifty ideas and dark images. It hints at some cerebral ideas like perception vs. reality without forcing me to ask those same questions about my reality. Other than her really bad American accent, Natalie Dormer is an appealing lead. In Game of Thrones and The Tudors she was very distinctive as a certain kind of calculating character. It's nice to see her a bit more human in this.

I'm not sure I see the need to make Dormer twins. They tried to make the movie more about the twin-tuition than the suicide forest, and that is a gross miscalculation of what people came to see. It's hard to be angry at any horror movie that keeps things to a tight 90 minutes and actually tries for some scares. I got what I wanted from it.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend