The Forest

This was the second film I watched with my dad when Mother was away, and let's just say, it was not the best out of the two. Out of the two, would I rather watch this or men being chased by female zombies? Zombies anyday. The Forest is about a women who travels to a forest in Japan, known for its suicides, to look for her missing sister. I wanted to see this film from the get go, another based on a true story, and one about a forest where people go and never come back out, yes please. But part of me wished I had just read up the story instead...

---

The Forest starts as a very good film, it's an interesting story, sticks pretty much to the real myth, holds you along with the story and who doesn't like Natalie Dormer? It is also creepy, there are random girls who appear out of woods and random dead bodies kept under B&Bs, all things that just shout "NOPE", at you, really. Me and my dad were really into this at this point, especially after I had Googled the entire woods story, making it even more interesting to us both, but that is about where the good times end..

Sara meets a charming man in a bar who tells her he knows a tour guide to take her to the woods, of course he does, and they head out the next day to find the lost twin - oh yes, twin. Am I the only person who goes a little off a film when an actor plays twins, I think it started with the film Mama...? As soon as I heard she was playing twins, I lost a little bit of enjoyment. Which tripled once she got into the forest and the whole film went downhill...
It's a creepy film, and some say it's slow, which it is a little but I think that helps with the creepiness, but then the story tries to add in twists and shocks and it just gets confusing. It seems to lose itself. It wants to shock, but adds in so much that it loses the forest side to it, and you end up seeing flashbacks with parts that both me and my dad missed, that were actually very important. 
It just had too much going for it at the same time, I won't mention it all, because there are a fair few spoilers, but somethings you think are happening, then the next minute it hasn't but then something makes you think something else. This isn't always a bad thing, but here it is confusing, there are so many things, it seems like it doesn't know where it wants to go. And a lot of the time was spent sharing confused looks, and pausing the film to ask what on earth just happened/what something means.

---

I was excited for this, and it was a bit of a let down. It's a fairly fun film to kill some hours, but that's pretty much it. It just needed to decide what it wanted to do story wise and it was just lost. It was pretty much like someone lost in the forest in said film, apart from it hasn't commited suicide...yet.

---