The Forest – Modern horror 101

I can tell you now… this is going to be a short review.  If you’ve watched a horror movie made after ‘The Ring’ (US remake, this is) then you’ve pretty much seen ‘The Forest.’ It seems that even though ‘The Ring’ didn’t invent this type of film, it did make it popular enough to totally create the formula for a thousand similar films to come.  The protagonist (normally a woman – in this case ‘Game of Thrones’ Natalie Dormer) comes across a spooky occurrence and sets out to investigate… slowly.

Natalie Dormer plays Sara, a twin whose sister goes missing in a forest in Japan.  Therefore Sara has to travel half way round the world to investigate.  Of course when she arrives she soon finds that local folklore states that the forest is well and truly haunted, due to the fact that many people seem to go there to die.  So she investigates and – guess what – finds that it is definitely haunted.  But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.  She doesn’t go in alone.  In order to create a little (obligatory?) s3xual tension, the night before she goes hiking into the depths of the forest, she meets a man in a bar who seems interested enough in her story to help her out.  He makes it clear that he’s a journalist and, along with helping her, wants to record her story for a future article.  Actually, in a story that’s pretty run-of-the-mill, he’s one high point.  You may expect him to be the ‘gallant hero’ type, however, he’s actually a bit of a div – makes a nice change!

Anyway, his failings in the role of ‘leading/supporting’ man can’t really save the film.  Like I say, if you know your modern horror (2000s+ give or take) you’ll know how it goes – a slow build up on the tension then a load of shaky camera work and some jump scares, plus vaguely unsettling ghostly images to prove the film had a bit of a budget spent on make-up.  By the time you get near the end of the film you can sort of guess the ending, i.e. everyone lives happily ever after, everyone dies horribly, or there’s some sort of twist where it turns out that this was all some sort of virtual reality simulator created by vampires from the future.  Either way, you won’t really care.  By this time you’ll have been checking your Instagram account on your smartphone and have forgotten you were even watching this film.

The actors were good enough.  They did their best with what was provided.  There just wasn’t enough original material here to offer any seasoned horror buff anything new.  If you’ve never seen a horror film before you’ll probably adore ‘The Forest.’ Personally, being someone who has a DVD collection with 90% of titles ending ‘…of the Living Dead,’ I’ve been here and moved on.  Still, Natalie Dormer was good in Game of Thrones.

5/10 a hard trek, a bit like unicycling to Mordor and back