The Forest (2016)

The Aokigahara forest is a real place where real people go to die, a fact the filmmakers discovered, by their own account, while reading a Wikipedia article. That origin story tells us most of what we need to know about The Forest, a 2016 supernatural horror picture that treats a site of genuine national grief as a scenic backdrop for an American woman's psychological unraveling. The production could not shoot in the actual forest, so it decamped to Serbia, where a stand-in woodland and a former warehouse did the work. Japan appears here as atmosphere: mist, a helpful local who explains the supernatural rules, and a great deal of moss.

Natalie Dormer heads the cast in dual roles, playing twin sisters separated by hair color and very little else. A capable Japanese ensemble surrounds her, though the screenplay assigns those performers to supporting duties and, in the case of the vengeful spirit Hoshiko, to the part of the menacing other. This is the inverse of representative casting, a white lead shepherding a story set in a country she is merely visiting. The film drew criticism on release for trivializing suicide in Japan, and the criticism was fair. Nothing in the narrative engages with the culture it borrows beyond the aesthetic of a haunted wood.

What the film offers, in the way of progressive sensibility, is a female protagonist and a sister-sister bond that carries the emotional weight. That is standard horror architecture, not a statement. There is no romantic reward waiting for the lead, no lecture, no sermon about the world outside the trees. The mental illness on display is a plot device, a condition that makes characters wander into caves and stab the wrong man. The result is a modest, muddled chiller that reached for topicality and came back with scenery.