Overview
Set in the Aokigahara Forest, a real-life place in Japan where people go to end their lives. Against this backdrop, a young American woman comes in search of her twin sister, who has mysteriously disappeared.
There is not much to say about this unremarkable horror movie. Let me try anyway.
Sara (Natalie Dormer) has a twin sister Jess (Natalie Dormer again) who was seen entering the infamous Suicide Forest near Mount Fuji in Japan. Sara knows Jess is still alive and travels out to find her. Once arrived near the Aokigahara Forest, she learns that it is filled with the ghosts of people who committed suicide there, but according to a local guide: whatever you see or hear here is not real, it is all in your head… And so she sets off into the forest with a journalist Aidan (Taylor Kinney) who she met in the bar the night before, and the local guide.
The movie has two main problems: the narrative is weak (a common problem in horror movies), and well, it just isn’t really very scary, not even in a B-movie cheap scare way.
On the plus side, the imagery and atmosphere are good enough, and the acting is pretty decent – Dormer is not bad at all even if she seems to react to most scares with a not quite befitting naive inquisitiveness which doesn’t help in the movie’s attempts at building a horror-level tension. So to make sure the film can still be called a horror movie, the director employs various cheap scare scenes – they sometimes work but none of them offer anything new – they have all been done before. There actually are a couple of twists-with-potential in the story, but the narrative isn’t sufficiently detailed for these to really work.
Not scary enough to be a horror movie, not interesting enough to be a thriller. And by the end of the movie, if you are still watching, you don’t really care about its conclusion anymore either.
4/10.
