Japan’s loony suicide culture seems like an adequately scary backdrop for a horror movie, but the routine horror flick “The Forest” mostly settles for cheap thrills.
Natalie Dormer plays twin sisters Sara and Jess, the latter of whom goes missing in Japan, where she teaches high school. Jess’s last known destination was Aokigahara, a forest at the foot of Mt. Fuji that is a traditional magnet for large numbers of people committing suicide.
Sara, visiting from the US and deploying her twin ESP, can vaguely sense that her sister is still alive and finds a sympathetic listener in a friendly journalist named Aiden (Taylor Kinney). He offers to help look for Jess in exchange for permission to write about the search.
“The Forest” has a tight structure and keeps you off-balance by sticking with the point of view of its increasingly bewildered lead character, who learns that the wicked spirits of Aokigahara can lead people astray and make them see things that aren’t there. A sign posted at the entrance to the park warns visitors, “Stay on the path.” But Sara can’t help but wander off it, and when she sees what she thinks is Jess’ tent, she ignores all advice and elects to stay the night. “If they bring in a tent, it means they’re not sure,” advises a helpful guide.
The atavistic setting, with its fairy-tale overtones and dead bodies hanging from trees everywhere, makes for rich atmosphere. Too bad, then, that director Jason Zada makes every hackneyed move in the horror playbook, not excluding having random people suddenly lurch into the frame or staging cheap dream sequences.
The heart of the story should have been the psychodrama between the two sisters, not the many scenes of Sara running through the woods like a ditz, uncertain whether to trust Aiden or the Japanese schoolgirl who tells her she knows Jess. At one point she falls into a hole, but instead of working her way out she is simply saved. It would be unfair to say she makes a poor protagonist just because she’s passive, though: It’s also because she’s dumb.