★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
In his 2011 tour Roadrunner,
comedian Lee Evans enacted a skit mocking IKEA’s bizarre store trail. Holding
the microphone very close to his mouth and pulling a grotesque face, Evans
would suddenly rasp “Don’t stray from the path!” This is essentially less ridiculous
but far scarier shorthand for Jason Zada’s horror film The Forest.
This feeble string of cattle prod jump-scares loosely hung
from a plot follows Natalie Dormer’s Jessica Price, who searches for her lost
twin sister in the heart of Japan’s infamous Aokigahara forest. Before her
first attempt to find Sara, Jess encounters journalist/guide/suspiciously hunky
Aiden (Taylor Kinney) who offers a helping hand, warning of the apparitions
known to befall those who set foot in the ‘Suicide Forest’.
Aokigahara is an eerie, real-life location with a rich history
but is poorly served both as a landmark and as a fountain for chills: Japan as
a whole, in fact, is presented in an awfully touristy fashion. Strangers bang
their faces on taxi windows for no reason, Jess refuses to try speaking
Japanese when faced with a native waypoint owner, and everyone else is a bunch
of replaceable, superstitious scaredy-cats.
Dormer carries the dead weight of the film with some grace,
despite her character fulfilling the threadbare cliché of idiotic horror leads
who don’t think it’s a good idea to tell anyone about the shrieks she alone
hears late at night, nor heed the warning of learned forest experts. The script
gives Jess puddle-deep development, but is highly preferable to the utter lack
of complexity lumped upon the few supporting roles. Plus, the less said about
the performances themselves, the better (readers are invited to insert their
own ‘wooden’ jokes).
Now we reach the crux of the issue: the scares, or (more
accurately) the lack thereof. Signposted creeps are one thing, but ambivalence turns
to annoyance when the payoff is ripped shamelessly from other works (see the
spookily-fringed Japanese schoolgirl pinched from The Ring) or utterly nonsensical (three old women with no
connection to the past, present or future horrors of the characters pottering
about outside Jess’ tent one night). The final act takes a turn for the absurd,
and, in one ludicrous instance, we’re expected to feel fear at the presence of
power-bar wrappers.
The Forest is a ‘nothing’
film: much like Woman in Black: Angel of
Death and Sinister 2, it joins
the rapidly growing ranks of mainstream ‘horror’ fare that enters one ear and
leaves the other with little impact or injury imparted on the way. Unintentional
hilarity and Dormer’s inherent magnetism are poor consolation for a film that
is equal parts lazy, bereft of scares and predictable to a t(r)ee.
