“Apparently they have a forest in Japan where people go to kill themselves…” Inspired by genuinely disturbing real-life stories of suicides in the Aokigahara forest, which also provides the setting for Gus van Sant’s The Sea of Trees, this mechanical chiller sends Natalie Dormer’s Sara Price into the woods (Serbia’s Tara national park doubling for the real thing) in search of her missing twin sister. What ensues is essentially a walking tour of hackneyed horror tropes – from the Blair Witch setting (tents that go bump in the night) to the J-horror spectres (scary schoolgirls etc), the Evil Dead-style cabin in the woods, and the inevitable hole that takes us on a brief diversion into the territory of The Descent. There are a couple of creepy moments in The Forest, interspersed with several more quiet-quiet-BANG cattle-prod scares, but the tourist’s eye view of Japan grates (all live sushi and sidelined indigenous characters) as much as the absence of originality.
