The Forest (2016): Perhaps the Most Racist Movie in Recent American History

In the time we took to formulate and record this episode, the world witnessed the police murder George Floyd, an innocent, unarmed, subdued black man. The world has been awoken to the reality of police brutality on a scale never before seen. This demands our full attention. While today’s episode is, while topical, rather light, we want to address the subject of white supremacy in America and what we, especially as white women, can do to combat it. While we say in this week’s episode that we are planning a full breakdown of the situation and a current events discussion, we decided later that our role in this is to amplify black voices, creations, products, and media. Our next episode will focus solely on resources for combating internalized and externalized racism, recommendations for black-run podcasts, literature, stores, and other media.

In the meantime, we do in fact have a bad horror movie review. While it was initially intended to be a sort of comedic break from some of the horror of real life, it ended up also being a commentary on internalized, systemic racism. Hooray!

Oh Boy

Yup. You may know this particular film from the (completely justified) boycott that followed - today we’re talking about Jason Zada’s The Forest (2016).

In a nutshell, the movie is about Sara (Natalie Dormer), a woman who finds that her twin sister, Jess (also Natalie Dormer) has gone missing in Aokigahara (the Suicide Forest) while working as a teacher in Japan. Convinced that her sister is not, in fact, dead, Sara flies to Japan and microaggresses an entire culture for fifty minutes, ignores the good advice of friendly locals, and ultimately (SPOILER ALERT) dies an unsatisfying, narratively boring death by Suicide Forest ghosts (!?!?!?) at the end of what is an ultimately predictable and uncomfortably racist film.

Is It Really That Bad?

This movie is so bad that I forgot that I had watched it the next day - but it’s badness is multi-layered. As with so many poorly-reviewed horror films, one of The Forest’s biggest failures was in being simply mediocre in every way. It fails on every level, both as a movie and as a horror movie. 

Narratively speaking, the writing seems absurdly committed to contradicting itself. The plot has almost no structure, and the first half focuses almost solely on mystifying and othering Japan. No really - there are multiple scenes dedicated to illustrating how uncomfortable and strange Japan is compared to Sara’s normal western culture. But in all these scenes, the authors unintentionally make their protagonist appear naive and careless at best - and blatantly bigoted at worst.

The second half is spent in Aokigahara itself, where Sara is written to be infuriatingly stupid, stubborn, and self-contradictory. Where she seems to understand the reality of her situation in one scene, she acts surprised by the strange things in the forest in the next. In fact, neither of the lead characters are given the dignity of character consistency. They act only to further the almost-nonexistent plot, character motivation be damned.

And as an avid lover of horror movies, this film was depressing to watch. It was painfully clear that neither the writers nor director cared for the genre they were working with. The fundamental parts that make horror work were ignored by the creative team, and audiences were left with a soulless shell with spooky string music and subpar lighting. Oh, and ghosts that make the Skyrim dragon noise.

All That And Racist?

What did we expect from a movie that was boycotted for being - you guessed it - racist? This lackluster team of writers crafted a script that reads like it was written in a couple hours over Moscow Mules. Why on Earth would we have expected any cultural sensitivity?

As I mentioned earlier, the film treats Japan like a mysterious other-world where the people are just, like, weird, you know? For the first half, the only real jump-scares/creepy moments are centered around Sara feeling like a stranger in a strange land. Sushi that moves? Ew! Homeless men approaching Sara’s cab? Gross! An old blind woman who dares exist in her own home? Freaaaaky! Also, as a side note, can we stop making movies about other countries where the only leads with significant screen time are white?

Predictably, Sara’s written-in attitude toward the Japanese people she meets isn’t much better. Every single Japanese person is downright saintly to this disrespectful colonizer, and she takes every opportunity to give a holier-than-thou scoff, an eye roll, a coy “sure sweetie” smirk. She is so utterly rude and condescending that you want this woman to die by the time she enters the forest. The only smart person in the entire movie is a Japanese forest ranger named Michi, and she treats him like absolute garbage for the duration of his screen time (which is, of course, less than ten minutes total). Boy, we hated this character.

That, of course, and the generalization that all Japanese people are terrified of yurei. And the disregard for the genuinely awful history of Aokigahara in favor of making it about “ooh spooky demons in the forest make you suicidal.” 

Wait, There’s Demons?

Oh, yeah, the thesis of the film actually has nothing to do with suicide or mental health. In fact, Sara openly disdains depression and suicidal tendencies, chalking up her own twin’s two suicide attempts to “romanticization.” The protagonist of this film displays blatant disdain for the bodies found during their search and doesn’t seem to take the implications of the forest seriously (which makes sense, since the writers certainly didn’t). 

Instead, the script opts to play with the idea that the forest is inhabited by angry spirits of the dead, yurei, which cause those who walk outside the path to hallucinate and eventually kill themselves - by accident or otherwise. The film ignores the mental health aspect to the forest, the tragic history associated with it, and instead chooses to pursue a lazy ghost/demon story that plays out like an hour and a half-long yawn.

Well, That’s Depressing

It is perhaps one of the most ill-advised films I’ve ever seen, and that comes entirely from a lack of care from the creative team. It was painfully obvious that this group of people didn’t care about the work they were doing, and it was honestly insulting to watch. 

To be perfectly honest, it was pretty exhausting to see such a prime example of the internalized systemic racism in Hollywood. These kinds of movies come from a place of zero compassion and contribute to a larger dynamic of dehumanizing people of color. This time, we don’t recommend you watch it - not only is it not worth it, we also don’t want to give these poor excuses for writers and creatives any more visibility. We regret watching this. It’s gross and dangerous, and we’ve had enough of gross, dangerous people.