The Forest
Mar. 25th, 2021 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
iariaMeh.
+ I liked Sara telling Aiden to story of her parents deaths while concurrently we see what actually happened to them.
+ I liked the sequence of Sara chasing Jess through the woods - trying to catch up to her sister but instead causing her to run for her life and in the end saving it.
+ I liked the part where Sara was lost in the woods and a yūrei is calling her name, telling her to look, and she refuses and runs which ends in her falling into the cave. It tied back into her own trauma of not looking at her parents deaths nicely. She avoided it then, it's haunted her since but she continues to never look at the dark/upset and this time it lands her in the cave. A nice metaphor for her.
... that was mostly it? Overall it didn't grab me at all - the characters, the horror - it was just meh. I felt like they definitely could have done something far more interesting with the story than they did. Dormer was okay but I didn't really connect to her character(s) which I think was really necessary for this movie to work.
+ Sara is so frazzled and losing it so hard and yet we get no real self-awareness on her part that it's happening? Like she sees a body flowing down the river in the wrong direction, she sees maggots under her skin and is about to cut them out until Aiden calls her and then they're gone, and yet neither of these incidents cause her to question her own perception of events? Hoshiko is the one who tells her not to trust Aiden but is then soon after revealed to be a yūrei and yet Sara continues to completely distrust Aiden?
+ I felt bad for Aiden. He was acting in part out of self-interest (the story) but he didn't deserve to die for it. That said his choice to leave the campsite instead of waiting a couple hours for Michi to arrive was so bad. WTF, dude? He’s never been there before, he’s been told how easy it is to get lost, he knows it’s dangerous. Her hand was not so bad as to take that kind of risk. So dumb. If they’d simply stayed there like they were supposed to this movie would have had a happy ending and only been half as long. Also a terrible Aiden idea: to give Sara his knife. I kind of get it but she was clearly not doing great mentally.
+ There was a part early into their trek into the forest where she hears her name and reacts and you see him observing her - I feel like instead of the fake out twist on whether he's involved in Jess's disappearance or not it could have been more interesting if he was doing a story/study on how the forest affects people mentally? Something like that where he's purposefully watching for her breakdown, maybe adding things in to try and push her mental deterioration more. Make him firmly morally grey. It would have made his character more interesting and his decisions make more sense, and made his death feel more schadenfreude-y.
+ I also felt really bad for Jess. Seeing the bodies of their parents' murder/suicide obviously badly affected her (both of them, really) but she always had Sara there to save her from herself, to pull her back from the edge. And Sara does it again - at the price of her life (and soul?) Jess is going to have so much guilt and regret to live with. I'm choosing to believe that this is actually going to push her into getting her life in order - in honour of her sister.
+ I liked Sara telling Aiden to story of her parents deaths while concurrently we see what actually happened to them.
+ I liked the sequence of Sara chasing Jess through the woods - trying to catch up to her sister but instead causing her to run for her life and in the end saving it.
+ I liked the part where Sara was lost in the woods and a yūrei is calling her name, telling her to look, and she refuses and runs which ends in her falling into the cave. It tied back into her own trauma of not looking at her parents deaths nicely. She avoided it then, it's haunted her since but she continues to never look at the dark/upset and this time it lands her in the cave. A nice metaphor for her.
... that was mostly it? Overall it didn't grab me at all - the characters, the horror - it was just meh. I felt like they definitely could have done something far more interesting with the story than they did. Dormer was okay but I didn't really connect to her character(s) which I think was really necessary for this movie to work.
+ Sara is so frazzled and losing it so hard and yet we get no real self-awareness on her part that it's happening? Like she sees a body flowing down the river in the wrong direction, she sees maggots under her skin and is about to cut them out until Aiden calls her and then they're gone, and yet neither of these incidents cause her to question her own perception of events? Hoshiko is the one who tells her not to trust Aiden but is then soon after revealed to be a yūrei and yet Sara continues to completely distrust Aiden?
+ I felt bad for Aiden. He was acting in part out of self-interest (the story) but he didn't deserve to die for it. That said his choice to leave the campsite instead of waiting a couple hours for Michi to arrive was so bad. WTF, dude? He’s never been there before, he’s been told how easy it is to get lost, he knows it’s dangerous. Her hand was not so bad as to take that kind of risk. So dumb. If they’d simply stayed there like they were supposed to this movie would have had a happy ending and only been half as long. Also a terrible Aiden idea: to give Sara his knife. I kind of get it but she was clearly not doing great mentally.
+ There was a part early into their trek into the forest where she hears her name and reacts and you see him observing her - I feel like instead of the fake out twist on whether he's involved in Jess's disappearance or not it could have been more interesting if he was doing a story/study on how the forest affects people mentally? Something like that where he's purposefully watching for her breakdown, maybe adding things in to try and push her mental deterioration more. Make him firmly morally grey. It would have made his character more interesting and his decisions make more sense, and made his death feel more schadenfreude-y.
+ I also felt really bad for Jess. Seeing the bodies of their parents' murder/suicide obviously badly affected her (both of them, really) but she always had Sara there to save her from herself, to pull her back from the edge. And Sara does it again - at the price of her life (and soul?) Jess is going to have so much guilt and regret to live with. I'm choosing to believe that this is actually going to push her into getting her life in order - in honour of her sister.
