Into the Forest (2016)

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Beautiful, moving film.

A lot of fun.

It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

It had a good premise and good casting but the movie was pretty slow paced and had no real build up, the ending was absolutely ridiculous and that's what really ruined it for me.

THE GOOD,acting was low key but suspenseful ,the interaction between spoiled brat sisters touching. The cinematography very good. Made me check my survivalist stockpile while realizing I could survive but could not survive my angry , isolated ,fragmentary, diversified ill prepared America neighborhoods ...that safe zone forest road that those two sister take for granted is a thousand miles away. THE BAD.The narcissism between all the characters (except Dad) was exhausting...maybe mirroring the unraveling American society and how Hollywood is now fixated on male typecasting..rapist,creep or beta male. Now these isolated female slackers eat Rice n Beans for a year while the unseen society over the hills implodes.Both are two self absorbed to bother experimenting with rudimentary forest skillfulness , bitching or pouting for months on end]The selfish defiance statement as the end is how it would end.

This film should have been titled 'Hanging About in a House for Months With No Electricity'. Only in the final couple of minutes does the story start to do what the title promises, when the girls actually go Into the Forest. Following them in there, tracking their story of survival, might have been interesting. As it is, very little happens in the big modern house in the wood. One of the girls dances a lot, but misses her music. The other thinks about going off with her character-free boyfriend, but changes her mind. There is one nasty, very violent rape, dislocated from the rest of the story. The reason for the apocalyptic power cut is never convincingly explained and while the months tick by (we know this via helpful captions) the women are unchanged - even their hair stays the same, with one of them sporting the same razor-sharp cut after eight months that she had at the beginning. The season does not change either - three months, six months, whatever, it is still May. As for the ending, why would they set fire to the place? What possible reason was there to do that? (I wondered if it was an attempt to imitate the ending in Housekeeping, a brilliant and totally different film). Only two good things in this: the beautiful forest, what little we saw of it; and Evan Rachel Wood's beautiful face.

I would just like to know what they were doing with several giant sacks of salt, but didn't have propane, emergency fuel, and even quickly ran out of soap! They're starving to the point of reading books to continue their vegetarian diets of berries while there's wild boar roaming around?! They don't shoot one until big sis is vitamin deprived wasting away?They smile when they burn the whole house down with all their life's mementoes (including all those precious books that apparently allowed them to survive so long) because a part of the roof caved in and big sis diagnosed and overreacted to suspected black mold by a little sniff in the stormy air?! Why didn't they just live in the *huge* dance studio? Among a list of other silly things they did/didn't do, in real life they wouldn't have lasted that long, even with naiive dad around.