Last year, Gus Van Sant brought his movie The Sea of Trees to Cannes – an exasperatingly sentimental film set in Japan’s Aokigahara forest, a vast woodland wilderness that has become notorious as a place where people come to take their own lives. Part of that film’s problem was an inability to decide if it was supposed to be scary or sad.
This average new film has at least made its mind up. It’s a scary J-horror about Sara (Natalie Dormer), who goes to Japan to find her twin sister Jess, who has gone missing in this forest. Locals warn Sara that going into Aokigahara is dangerous: the spirits there will sense any sadness in your heart and use it against you. So there are some jolts and scares connected to Sara and Jess’s unhappy childhood, supernaturally resurrected in the forest’s mysterious, greeny gloom.
It’s a very by-the-numbers movie, and Aokigahara becomes just another generic creepy forest that might as well be fictional. (Actually, for all the flaws in The Sea of Trees, it could be said that, by not being a conventional horror, it underlined the fact that this extraordinary place is real – and so paradoxically came closer to being genuinely disturbing.) Maybe The Forest and The Sea of Trees will bring loads of tourists to Aokigahara, now that they’re not allowed to fix padlocks to the Pont des Arts.
