MovieChat Forums > The Forest (2016) Discussion > This makes more sense right???!!

This makes more sense right???!!

posted 9 years ago by jesslfortunato
13 replies | jump to latest

****SPOILERS SO DON'T BLAME ME*******

I never rant on here, I swear, but honestly this movie had SO MUCH PROMISE! I watch more horror movies in a week than one should willingly admit, so I"m used to garbage, but this movie was doing ok and then violently veered off into tacky cliche land!

Bless you if you read this post, bc I'm coming out hot.

For starters, they were clearly two separate people. I've seen the split personality guess a lot on here, but Jess and Sara were clearly two separate entities. They each lived lives 6 thousand miles apart, interacted with other people, Sara was married. There were multiple pics of twin girls. Tons of examples.

The Dad killed the mom. The girls were upstairs with Grandma, Dad offed Mom and then himself in the basement. Jess saw the bodies, Sara was too scared to look. She tells the car accident lie while remembering (thus sharing with us) the true story. Would you REALLY tell a stranger the truth in that scenario? Oh hey, I just met you, let me tell you how I come from bananapants/murdering kin! Of course she lied. I'd lie all the time if that was the true story! This also somewhat gives us a reason to believe Jess would last longer in the woods, she faces darkness/fear while Sara does not.

Why was Aiden in this movie? He served literally 0 purpose in the end. But not in the ending I was imagining.

Aiden says "I've been in the woods 100s of times" and "I never go into the woods alone." He's clearly proficient in where he is going, maybe even more than the guide guy. Which is why I heavily thought they were leaning toward him being a killer of some sort. I mean think about it. You're from Australia (with no FREAKING accent) you kill girls for kicks and drag their bodies into a location where people literally grab the bodies with almost no questions asked. It's the PERFECT dumping ground. You technically do "never go into the woods alone *wink*" because you're always dragging a lifeless corpse with you and you know your murder garden like a pro. I was heavily assuming Jess had been another victim (with him taking it possibly a step further, showing off the dark and scary forest, hanging out with her a night in the tent/seeing her favorite poem)
Then possibly killing her in the cabin or wherever.

Taking it a step further, the story goes the ghosts haunt the forest because they are sad and trapped. Perhaps they would be inclined to help a person who didn't WANT to die to live. Basically coming to Sara's aid (this ofc also including her now dead ghost sister) and them ending Aiden and his kills.

Instead, Jess stumbles out of nowhere totally fine. And somehow Sara bled out from 4 arm scratches that were barely even bleeding!??! She didn't even slit her wrists the "correct" way.

This movie could have awesomely mixed the subject of monsters as supernatural entities hiding in the dark with the fact that real monsters are most often just ordinary people.

BUT NO instead we got a freaking jump scare at the end.

Thanks for reading, I'm going to go break this DVD in half.

[–] cjohnmartin 9 years ago

Alot of good points. Don't think I could say it any better.

[–] lockon_stratos 9 years ago

I agree the movie had promise but it was okay overall. Aiden's character was to make us believe if Sarah was going crazy or not that he was the killer or not. I think the ending was good enough that Jess came out not Sarah. We saw nothing of Jess and then she appears okay in the end. Bittersweet ending maybe.

[–] klauke 9 years ago

just one little point about the 'wrist scratches', this was a pg13 film, so just because the cuts didnt LOOK overly deep due to the rating, you can be sure if anything it was primarily indicative of a mortal wound, rather than the reality the filmmakers werent allowed to show due to the rating. She was really sawing away at 'her fathers fingers', so yeah, it was a reasonable wound.

as for the ghosts, many ghost stories have ghosts that are NOT the same as the person they once were... this film seemed to go with the storytelling concept that the people who died were sad, depressed people, so their ghosts are angry and bitter i guess you could say to reflect their fragile emotional state, rather than their intentions or their personality, so i didnt think that was TOO problematic from a storytelling point of view.

aiden was in the film purely as a red herring.. something for the heroine to be afraid of.. he was a narrative device, nothing more... pretty lazy story writing, but thats literally his purpose... to give doubt, and create a sinister scenario the audience is unsure about.

[–] SaliceMcD 9 years ago

He seemed a *crimson* red herring to me. Someone so familiar with the forest that he gets lost, and has to follow the river to find his way out of it? Who "stumbles on" the cabin, not having known it existed? I thought Sara's seeing - or "seeing" - the energy bar wrapper (?) on the floor was meant to imply he'd already been inside it - that day, or some other - so would have already tried out the radio, and was just pretending to be taking his first shot at it with Sara there.

I thought, as well, that somebody must have stepped in and changed the storyline.

[–] suanniiq 9 years ago

There was a lot of potential directions this moive could have went into and agree with what you wrote--it makes you wonder after the first or second cut the producers got involved and thought stupid kids who like these kids of movies want jump scares--and gave us this movie. There were too many bad cuts in the show that jump and jarred you out of the moive, as if something was supposed to happen and we never got to see it....

[–] Beardogger 9 years ago

Great post. :)

[–] sunbatt50 9 years ago

Just a quibble - Aidan never said he was Australian. He's obviously American.

He just said he worked for an Australian travel magazine.

[–] joodense 9 years ago

I was totally expecting the same ending as you. When the other sister pops up I said to my girl "seriously she's just been *beep* chilling these last 2 days?" ---- so they came up with an ending I didn't expect but is hard to defend. Def took the movie from a solid 5 (if u watch as much horror as me a solid 5 is still fun) to a meh 3.5

[–] joodense 9 years ago

Oh yea also some of the theories on this board. Come on people this movie wishes it was deep but really there's only one interpretation IMO.

[–] prasadceleb 9 years ago

I think this movie did just ok. I really didn't want to see any supernatural entities considering the setting and history of the forest but a more like 1408 type horror and I guess it did ok. Come to think of it, it's more of a psychological horror rather than a supernatural one. There are many scientific explanations as to why many of the things were happening and the fact that how Sara was acting all weird right from the start gave indications of where it was going. I guess Aiden served the purpose to show how much the forest was messing with Sara, her actions towards him indicated that. Also I do think that Jess coming out randomly was a cliche and that ending jumpscare just ruined the entire setting. Maybe they wanted to stick to the old principle of "the spirits come back angry" but it was all too late to come to that. They should've just shown the forest as it was instead. I'd give this a 7/10.