The For­est

There is a vast for­est in Japan where peo­ple go to kill them­selves. This we learn at the begin­ning of direc­tor Jason Zada’s debut fea­ture, when Natal­ie Dormer’s Sara receives a phone call inform­ing her that her iden­ti­cal twin sis­ter has gone miss­ing in the place known local­ly as ​“Aoki­ga­hara”.

Ignor­ing both the advice of well-inten­tioned experts and the evi­dence star­ing her in the face (“We’re iden­ti­cal twins; if she were dead, I would know,”) Sara sets off in search of Jess accom­pa­nied by a hunky Aus­tralian journo she meets in a bar en route – because what a woman real­ly needs when she’s at her most vul­ner­a­ble is a ran­dom stranger to pro­tect her. Aiden (Tay­lor Kin­ney) presents him­self as the per­fect gen­tle­man, but it’s pret­ty clear he’s fol­low­ing some­thing oth­er than his nose for a good story.

Movies may have taught us to think twice before wan­der­ing off into the woods, but dark, leafy set­tings are only as chill­ing as the sin­is­ter forces that inhab­it them (see The Evil Dead, The Blair Witch Project, The Last House on the Left, I Spit on Your Grave, Eden Lake). The main rea­son why The For­est is so inef­fec­tive as a psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror, then, is that its vague super­nat­ur­al threat is nei­ther affect­ing nor unsettling.

The stilt­ed dia­logue and unnec­es­sary flash­backs estab­lish­ing Jess and Sara’s twin­tu­ition don’t help (though in fair­ness Dormer does have rea­son­ably good chem­istry with her­self), but by far the film’s biggest prob­lem is its over-reliance on famil­iar genre tropes – a suc­ces­sion of cheap jump scares releas­es the dra­mat­ic ten­sion instead of adding to it.

It also falls rather ungrace­ful­ly into the same trap as Gus Van Sant’s dia­bol­i­cal Matthew McConaugh­ey dra­ma The Sea of Trees by posit­ing that all Japan­ese peo­ple are creepy and/​or mys­te­ri­ous. It’s a tired stereo­type that’s crude­ly per­pet­u­at­ed as a means of exploit­ing the pre­sumed xeno­pho­bia of its tar­get audience.