The Forest (2016) is a horror movie about a young woman, named Sara Price, who is on the search for Jess, her twin sister, in the Japanese Aokigahara forest. This forest isn’t just any forest, this one, in particular, has a reputation for suicide. It is said to be home to the yūrei, which are the ghosts of the dead in Japanese mythology. Sara travels to Japan with her mind set on going through the forest to find Jess. The locals warn her of it, telling her to “stay on the path,” but she doesn’t let their warnings get in her way. She finds a man named Aidan, and his friend Michi, who regularly walks through Aokigahara in search of bodies, to guide her through the forest. Throughout the journey, they had to get off the path, which caused her to experience hallucinations, making her doubt herself and her own guide. You only get to see her perspective of the story, but since she is an unreliable narrator, it makes you think about whether anything you saw was true or not.
I enjoyed this movie more than I thought I would. At first, I didn’t think it would be great, considering it had a somewhat rough start and was predictable. Throughout the movie, I started to like it more and more. I didn’t know what events were actually happening and what was just an illusion, I loved the games it made my brain play. If I’m being honest, I still don’t know if there was a bad guy and I love that.
Overall, I would recommend this movie to anyone who isn’t a big horror fan, but still likes an occasional scare. I would rate this movie a 3/5. It was good, but not something that I would go out of my way to watch again
