"The Forest" (2016) Movie Review

This movie didn't get great reviews but I think its still a decent movie to watch. In a previous review, I talked about how you can get the full effect of watching a horror movie, and for this one you need to do that. Whether it be in theaters or at home, you need to watch this movie in the dark. Aside from that the jump scenes are excellent, the story is kind of slow, and the acting is meh. To tell you the truth, I was more interested in the story about the forest that they gave in the movie than the actual plot itself.

The main characters Sara and Jess are twin sisters that are complete opposites. Sara is a well grounded person with a good head on her shoulders and Jess is the artsy, try anything once type of person. Jess teaches English in Japan and has been missing for a couple of days. Sara, who is in America, gets a call from Japanese authorities notifying her sister went into the famous Aokigahara Forest and had been missing for days her missing in the  sister.  After some back and forth with her fiance, she heads off to Japan to find Jess. Throughout her travels from the states to Japan Sara talks about her "magical" twin link with Jess. She gave the example of when Jess had a drug overdose and her heart stopped, they were states apart when this happened but she said she couldn't "feel" her anymore. She uses this logic to justify the search and why she thinks her sister is alive.
She found more evidence of the forest while going through Jess' apartment and where she work. There's a really good scene where Sara goes to Jess' class that she taught and all the students scream and freak out  because they thought she was a ghost.

I'll jump forward a little bit to what I think the most interesting part of the movie is; the story about the forest. The Aokigahara Forest is an actual forest that is at the base of Mt. Fuji. Hundreds of years ago families would take their sick or dying family members there to die. Presently people who are contemplating suicide go to the forest to either go through with it or realize that they don't want to die.

Due to all the deaths that have happened in the forest, they believe that it is haunted. They advise visitors to stay on the path and to focus on what they were there to do. There are so many deaths there that annually the police go through the forest and remove as many bodies as they can find.  There are a couple documentaries out there on YouTube that are really interesting to watch.  These documentaries are arguably better stories than the film portrays.

Ill leave the rest for you to see, there is a really weird twist at the end that I either didn't understand or it was just done poorly.