The Forest (2016)

good back-story, and good acting

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Blistering performances.

As many other people have said, the suicide forest is a scary concept that could lend itself to an intriguing horror movie. Unfortunately it's used as a background to a subpar jumpscare fest filled with average effects designed to scare you. The main character is supposed to be a skeptic who is determined to save her sister but instead appears to be rude and clingy. She starts the movie by being rude to her boyfriend for wanting her to wait a little while and let the police handle her sister's disappearance. She then goes to Japan where the locals tell her that they believe that evil spirits roam the forest. Instead of being polite and respecting the local culture while remaining skeptical she goes to a bar and complains about how everyone in town is crazy. She meets a man who can hook her up with an off duty officer to help her through the forest. She jumps on the idea. Upon meeting the officer he says that he will reluctantly take her. When she asks why he is reluctant he tells her it's because she seems troubled and might end up hurting herself. She then implies that anyone with a family member they love would happily run into the forest despite its reputation. When they go off path to look for people contemplating suicide they spot her sister's tent. The officer says that it's getting late and that he wants them to head home so they don't get lost. The woman then throws a tantrum about not wanting to leave and check on her sister tomorrow. The officer lets her stay the night as long as she promises to stay where she is. She quickly gets lured out of her tent and starts running around before the man at the bar stops her and tries to bring her back to camp. After that it's just jump scares. She ends up killing the bar dude and herself by just being an easily manipulated idiot (she takes a knife to her arm thinking that it's a good way to gets someone's hand of of her arm instead of just stabbing the guy's arm). Her sister just turned out to be lost in the forest and gets out ok. It ends with her jumpscaring the officer who told her that she was being stupid. The jump scares rarely manage to scare anyone since they come up at predictable times and are usually just your everyday computer generated corpse. The characters are dull as well as the plot. Instead of making a cool movie about the ghosts making you want to die of your own free will due to the terrifying spirits convincing the protagonist that the world is cruel (what the movie tried to make you think it was) the movie is an average lost in the woods with jumpscares film.

Was not able to finish this movie. It was extremely boring.

I'm a bit drunk so that movie wasn't that bad despite the lack of good acting, bad story and cheap special effects and so on. It could have been better but it wasnt, you can watch something better! Beeing wasted makes it better, so I think it's bad, I'm just generous with the stars.

The Forest was one of the most talked about movies of 2016, due to a large amount of criticism of white washing. Before I start my review, I want to say that, I am a white male. I have Japanese friends. I asked them about this movie before I watched it and they said that the Japanese culture was respected well, and there was no need for a whitewashing call on this movie. This wasn't as good as I was expecting. The way it was hyped up throughout 2016 in reviews and talk of those who had seen the movie, I was expecting a solid 10/10 from opening credits to end credits. It wasn't that great. At all.First of all, don't get me wrong. I found it quite enjoyable to watch. I was creeped out quite a bit. Some of it really had me on edge. Some of it made me cackle at how bad it was. Let's be real – the tunnel creatures? The CGI on those was horrendous and I didn't even feel bad laughing as Sarah ran in terror. There are a lot of interesting theories surrounding this, and a lot of them make sense, but at the end of the day, without the knowledge of the different theories, the film doesn't make a lot of sense, especially at the end. I wasn't keen, I got very confused through a lot of it, and there could have been a LOT MORE done to ensure that it wasn't confusing. Things could have been cut out, other things could have been done better and it would have made the film a lot easier to follow.The ending? I'm sick of the last few seconds of cliché of a character jumping at the screen. That's one thing this movie did really, really badly – it overused horror clichés to the point of it just being embarrassing.All in all though, it was quite scary, it had me on edge, and I found it to be quite unnerving, when it wasn't being embarrassing.