Like a lot of people, the overwhelmingly negative reception for The Forest didn't really put me off. I mean, sure i looked at the 10% rotten tomatoes score and thought "that many people surely cant be wrong?" But the film has a great premise which intrigued me, the problem is that it never managed to pull off what so easily could have made one of the better horror films in recent times. I mean, a few tweaks and this film could have been a psychological nightmare and a modern horror classic.. which is why it sucks that the film never managed to do that.
The film follows typical horror movie hot blonde Sarah (Natalie Dormer) as she embarks on a journey into the suicide forests of Japan to find her twin sister who is believed to have killed herself (also Natalie Dormer). What was interesting though is the underlying themes of madness within the forest. They were definitely there, but where they tried with the surreal imagery and the plot twists involving Sarah's overtaking madness, all it came across as was bizarre and not in a good way. Like the male character in the film, can't remember his name, but he was sort of a shifty character all of a sudden. There was no hint to it and then suddenly it is like "is he as bad as we are being led to believe?" Which again is a cool premise, but we needed to be slowly introduced to that from the beginning, not because the plot calls for it to suddenly happen. My theory is that he may have been that way because of her imagination and how the forest messes with her head, but it wasn't even made clear whether we were even supposed to speculate this, so he probably was just that way for the sake of it.
The setting looks great and creepy and could have had some real dark, psychological moments for us to be thinking about. What the film does is what most horrors do, which is rely on jump scares to lazily scare us. It doesn't work. The film wasn't scary and i really wanted it to be with such a premise. From the beginning creepy imagery and jumpscares are what we are spoon fed to be scared. The film did try i think, it had things there which worked, but as a whole it let me down. But Natalie Dormer does her best and shines as the lead and i have seen horror much worse than this before. In the end The Forest comes off as mediocre at best and i would only recommend if there is nothing to do and you happen to catch it on TV.
The film follows typical horror movie hot blonde Sarah (Natalie Dormer) as she embarks on a journey into the suicide forests of Japan to find her twin sister who is believed to have killed herself (also Natalie Dormer). What was interesting though is the underlying themes of madness within the forest. They were definitely there, but where they tried with the surreal imagery and the plot twists involving Sarah's overtaking madness, all it came across as was bizarre and not in a good way. Like the male character in the film, can't remember his name, but he was sort of a shifty character all of a sudden. There was no hint to it and then suddenly it is like "is he as bad as we are being led to believe?" Which again is a cool premise, but we needed to be slowly introduced to that from the beginning, not because the plot calls for it to suddenly happen. My theory is that he may have been that way because of her imagination and how the forest messes with her head, but it wasn't even made clear whether we were even supposed to speculate this, so he probably was just that way for the sake of it.
The setting looks great and creepy and could have had some real dark, psychological moments for us to be thinking about. What the film does is what most horrors do, which is rely on jump scares to lazily scare us. It doesn't work. The film wasn't scary and i really wanted it to be with such a premise. From the beginning creepy imagery and jumpscares are what we are spoon fed to be scared. The film did try i think, it had things there which worked, but as a whole it let me down. But Natalie Dormer does her best and shines as the lead and i have seen horror much worse than this before. In the end The Forest comes off as mediocre at best and i would only recommend if there is nothing to do and you happen to catch it on TV.