★

½

☆

☆

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In his 2011 tour Roadrunner, comedian Lee Evans enacted a skit mocking IKEA’s bizarre store trail. Holding the microphone very close to his mouth and pulling a grotesque face, Evans would suddenly rasp “Don’t stray from the path!” This is essentially less ridiculous but far scarier shorthand for Jason Zada’s horror film The Forest.





This feeble string of cattle prod jump-scares loosely hung from a plot follows Natalie Dormer’s Jessica Price, who searches for her lost twin sister in the heart of Japan’s infamous Aokigahara forest. Before her first attempt to find Sara, Jess encounters journalist/guide/suspiciously hunky Aiden (Taylor Kinney) who offers a helping hand, warning of the apparitions known to befall those who set foot in the ‘Suicide Forest’.





Aokigahara is an eerie, real-life location with a rich history but is poorly served both as a landmark and as a fountain for chills: Japan as a whole, in fact, is presented in an awfully touristy fashion. Strangers bang their faces on taxi windows for no reason, Jess refuses to try speaking Japanese when faced with a native waypoint owner, and everyone else is a bunch of replaceable, superstitious scaredy-cats.





Dormer carries the dead weight of the film with some grace, despite her character fulfilling the threadbare cliché of idiotic horror leads who don’t think it’s a good idea to tell anyone about the shrieks she alone hears late at night, nor heed the warning of learned forest experts. The script gives Jess puddle-deep development, but is highly preferable to the utter lack of complexity lumped upon the few supporting roles. Plus, the less said about the performances themselves, the better (readers are invited to insert their own ‘wooden’ jokes).





Now we reach the crux of the issue: the scares, or (more accurately) the lack thereof. Signposted creeps are one thing, but ambivalence turns to annoyance when the payoff is ripped shamelessly from other works (see the spookily-fringed Japanese schoolgirl pinched from The Ring) or utterly nonsensical (three old women with no connection to the past, present or future horrors of the characters pottering about outside Jess’ tent one night). The final act takes a turn for the absurd, and, in one ludicrous instance, we’re expected to feel fear at the presence of power-bar wrappers.





The Forest is a ‘nothing’ film: much like Woman in Black: Angel of Death and Sinister 2, it joins the rapidly growing ranks of mainstream ‘horror’ fare that enters one ear and leaves the other with little impact or injury imparted on the way. Unintentional hilarity and Dormer’s inherent magnetism are poor consolation for a film that is equal parts lazy, bereft of scares and predictable to a t(r)ee.