A suicide forest, a place where people go to kill themselves with the help of supernatural forces, sounds like a promising premise for a horror movie.
But unfortunately, “The Forest” isn’t that movie.
The real-life Aokigahara Forest at the base of Mount Fuji, dubbed the Suicide Forest, is the setting of “The Forest,” and it’s reportedly a popular site for suicides in Japan. “The Forest” takes that idea and makes it into a lightweight horror flick, though it’s really just another cinematic example of Americans abroad who are tormented on foreign soil (see most recent examples “No Escape” or “The Green Inferno”).
Here, Sara (Natalie Dormer in a dual role) learns her twin sister, Jess, who teaches abroad in Japan, has entered the forest. Sara flies around the world to find her, refusing to believe Jess would voluntarily go there to die. As her twin, she thinks she’d know if her sister was already dead.
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After receiving various warnings from the locals, Sara enters the forest with the guidance of Aiden (Taylor Kinney), a travel journalist she meets.
Once there, they mostly lumber about, encountering things that may or may not be real while the occasional jump scare plays out. Not one scare is authentic, much less effective.
“The Forest” is flawed on so many levels. It’s a tiresome bore, and the story is filtered through white characters when an Asian lead could have carried the movie just fine.
A twisty final act succeeds nicely, but it isn’t nearly enough to salvage the rest of this slow-moving snooze.
At the very least, “The Forest” succeeds in being an early front-runner for worst movie of 2016, at least until “Ride Along 2” comes out next week.
What “The Forest” • One star out of four • Run time 1:35 • Rating PG-13 • Content Disturbing thematic content and images
