If the horror is real, the movie enter into your house, bed, and dreams that turn it into nightmares. If you fall asleep almost like a baby, something’s not right. After the “Forest”, a low-budget ghost horror, the dream is quite peaceful.
In American horror, the forest was mostly used for masked killer “slashers” (Jason Voorhees, “Friday the 13th”) or sub-genre “found footage” experiments (“Project: Blair Witch”). In this movie, a junction of Hollywood and Japan, the lost souls roam the forest. And the forest is ideal for the horror, grounded in a real place. Located on Mount Fuji, Aokigahara is considered as a “suicide forest” where people go to commit suicide or, as in the movie, families leave there to die.
The twin sister of the heroine Sarah (Natalie Dormer; “Game of Thrones”, “Hunger Games: Mockingbird 1 & 2”) was last seen in this forest and, feeling that Jess is lost, not dead, goes to search
despite numerous warnings to stay away from the forest. Apart from the forest being the place where young people go to kill themselves, it is dominated by yurei, vengeful spirits, which are best left alone.
Playing with combinations of dream scenes, flashbacks and current events, the moments of horrors are meticulously released into the film and penetrate through, admittedly quite school-like and typical, scenes of familiarizing the characters with the current situation, and one or two medium-intensity jump scars are created just to frighten us.
The clichés of American “scary” movies (no phone signal, a shabby compass) the director manages to reduce only by the absence of a musical background, assuming a minimalist tactic to raise tensions with natural sounds, not a musical crescendo, while Sara wanders through the dark woods
The Forest is certainly one of the horror films that had a great foundation for making a good horror movie however the action that was supposed to be interesting, from scene to scene becomes boring and slow. The constant Sarah flashbacks at one point become really tiring to watch. The final twist redeems the previously seen and perhaps the impression of “Forest of Horror” would have been better had it not been ruined by the ending itself.
Apart from the visual part that is really ok ( but nothing too special ) and the eye-pleasing and somber atmosphere that is well-struck for this type of film, nothing is more thrilling.
