The Forest

It's a stupid ending with a boring movie attached.

Natalie Dormer stars as Sara – an identical twin disturbed when she gets the feeling something bad has happened to her sister, Jess (also Dormer). Jess has disappeared when hiking in a notorious Japanese forest known for its haunting ghosts and those among the living who go there to commit suicide.

The authorities all think Jess has done the unthinkable, but Sara still feels a psychic connection to her twin, so she heads to Japan to hunt for her in the forest.

Of course, she can’t go in alone, so she teams up with a hunky travel writer, Aiden (Taylor Kinney), and a man who often searches the forest to find the dead, Michi (Yukiyoshi Ozawa).

And, of course, they do everything you are not supposed to do if you want to emerge from the forest alive!

What happened to Jess?

What will happen to Sara?

Why is this trio tempting fate and the forces of evil?

The Forest is a weak horror movie that becomes atrocious due to an idiotic ending.

It’s a half-baked story and script where director Jason Zada and the three person writing team want to toss in lots of ideas, but don’t know how to develop them into anything impactful, so it comes off like a paint-by-numbers affair.

Zada knows how to make you jump once in a while with a quick scare, but the mood is flat as The Forest lacks any kind of mystery to hook the audience, even though one is tossed in too late to matter. There’s no build up, and no growing tension.

Eventually, the audience is supposed to be lured in by trying to figure out what is real and what is imagined by Sara as the evil forces within the forest try to mess with her brain, but we would have to find her compelling enough to care. Dormer can’t do anything to make Sara interesting because it isn’t there in the script, and she isn’t quite at the level to create it out of thin air. Lucky for her, she has done better work and will do so again, when she participates in a better project.

However, The Forest completely is undone when a ridiculous ending is tossed in out of nowhere. Again, Zada and the writing team figure they are supposed to have some sort of surprise ending, but the only surprise here is how disjointed and meaningless the whole ending becomes.

The Forest is rated PG-13 for disturbing thematic content and images.