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Forest, The
Other // PG-13 // January 8, 2016
List Price: Unknown [Buy now and save at Fandango]

An American woman, Sara (Natalie Dormer), receives a phone call from the authorities notifying her that her twin sister, Jess, has been presumed dead since she entered and never returned from Japan's Aokigahara Forest, a restricted area near Mount Fuji where people frequently go to commit suicide. Her intuition about the safety of her sister, however, suggests otherwise: that Jess is still alive and could, possibly, need her help. Against the wishes of her fiancee, Rob (Eoin Macken), Sara flies to Japan by herself and gets settled into a hotel near the forest, where her sister stayed. Efforts to find someone to go with her into The Forest are unsuccessful, until she runs into Aiden (Taylor Kinney), an experienced journalist who agrees -- along with a trail guide -- to go with Sara into the woods. With warnings from locals circulating in her head about the haunted and dangerous nature of the forest, she defiantly embarks on her journey to locate her sister, only to discover that those warnings had some credibility.
The Forest boasts more than enough elements that could elevate its atmosphere without any trouble: claustrophobic angles accentuating Sara's fish-outta-water place in a foreign country; the superstitions and metaphysics of Japanese culture; and the hazy expanses of the sprawling forests themselves. Despite the controversy over using the Aokigahara for a low-brow production like a horror flick, its storied

Thing is, Natalie Dormer's primary character, Sara, doesn't offer a particularly remarkable or deep headspace to explore, a dutiful sister whose personality relies on the interesting attributes of other people for hers to appear interesting, even with the tragedy of her past. That might've been allowable had The Forest continued down the path of standard jump-scares, but the script restrains its horror inclinations in service of paranormal drama, attempting to respect the Aokigahara's lineage -- well, as much as they can with dead bodies and visible specters -- and the uncanny bond between twin sisters that tells them whether one's in trouble or not. In fact, Sara's sister could've been a more engaging heroine, a darker girl who digs poetry and relocates to a foreign country for a therapeutic change in surroundings. Sara lacks that personality, no ambitions or interests beyond bailing her sister out of difficult situations, which casts a shadow over the limited dramatic potency. Being a stranger in a strange land under duress becomes her only compelling trait, and that naturally limits the idiosyncratic allure that brought Natalie Dormer's bodice-wearing characters to life.
By walking softly along the border between traditional horror and mystical drama, the search for Sara's sister within the historic forest disrupts one's patience with its protracted dullness, extended by a lack of tension and cumbersome attempts at sentiment by Aiden's inquisitive prompts and forthright flirtations. Smooth camerawork follows their hike throughout the forest -- filmed in Serbia as a substitute for the off-limits

Despite how The Forest diminishes its tension by virtually announcing the arrival of its few scare tactics -- overlong gaps of silence, suggestive angles, Dormer's widened eyes -- there's still enough paranormal intrigue here driving toward Sara's discovery of her twin sister's fate and the psychological torment she endures along the way. Sadly, those curiosities also become the film's undoing when the boundary separating reality and psychosis completely disappears, where the rules behind how Sara interacts with the Aokigahara's deceptions undercut the real drama surrounding her search, including who she can and cannot trust in her surroundings. Granted, everyone did warn us that bad things happen to the people who enter, but the murky and uncontrollable powers of the area force an ominous supernatural ending onto the search that lacks both weight and overall purpose. Without the scares to fill that dramatic void, all that's left surrounding the spirited talent of Natalie Dormer is a shrug-worthy, tepid stroll of a ghost story, one that'll get buried and fade from memory soon enough.
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