Japan's serene and notorious Aokigahara forest -- one of the most popular places on Earth to commit suicide -- has been a trendy setting for movies of late. Gus Van Sant's The Sea of Trees made a much derided appearance at last year's Cannes Film Festival, but if you missed that haute unveiling here's the ready-to-wear knockoff, also shot in a verdant look-alike forest (the Japanese government doesn't permit filming in the real Aokigahara) and also trying hard to invest its story with dread, revulsion, and tragedy while falling flat on its face.
Sara (Natalie Dormer) travels to Japan in search of her identical twin sister Jess (also Dormer, this time as a brunette wearing wild-child eyeliner), who went missing while chaperoning a field trip to Aokigahara for the bilingual school where she works. Everyone tells Sara to give up hope, but she has a hunch that her sister is still alive. A travel journalist (Taylor Kinney) makes her a deal: If she lets him use her sister's disappearance as the human-interest hook for the article he's writing, he'll allow her to tag along with the official guide (Yukiyoshi Ozawa) who's escorting him into parts of the forest off the main trail. But watch out: The ghosts of the suicides are restless and vengeful. Don't believe anything you see or hear, especially at night.
In lieu of creating interesting characters through which the audience can experience the hopelessness and dread of such a desperate place, The Forest instead follows this lather-rinse-repeat formula for 95 minutes: Something spooky appears (a flickering florescent light, an abandoned tent in the woods, a long-lost childhood toy); Sara takes tentative steps towards it, as if walking barefoot on a carpet strewn with tacks; and then -- boo! -- something jumps out. Sometimes it's benign, sometimes it isn't -- but after the tenth occurrence, who cares? Watching this film is like paying a visit to a schoolmate who never got tired of joy buzzers and whoopee cushions. (More importantly, it's arguably tasteless to set a rote, unremarkable horror movie in a locale where many real people have died. There are serious, sincere dramas that take place in Auschwitz, but are there any popcorn slasher flicks?)
It's a sign of lazy screenwriting when characters do an Internet search in order to provide exposition; it happens here early in the film, as Sara combs through websites and photos to explain Aokigahara's reputation for the uninitiated. But anyone can do that. Indeed, to get the facts straight about Aokigahara for this review, this critic did that, too. One of the discoveries was a 21-minute documentary commissioned by VICE magazine following an Aokigahara local on one of his regular sweeps of the forest, as he looks for suicides he can prevent and finds the bodies of those he was too late to help. It's an ominous, sad, profound, bittersweet, and fascinating short film, and it's free online. Watch that instead of The Forest.