Director: José Pedro Lopes
MPAA Rating: R
Run Time: 71 minutes
Aokigahara, colloquially known as “the Japanese Suicide Forest,” and “Sea of Trees,” has captured the fascination of many a horror and macabre fanatic for its inexplicable ability to attract those wishing to commit suicide. With an endless, dense stretch of foliage and fog, trails lined with signs pleading with hikers to reconsider their actions and bodies strewn about for days until attendants can locate and identify them, the forest’s influence over Japan’s significant disconsolate population has made it infamous worldwide.
Naturally, a recent cultural re-evaluation of the site as more of an attraction than a place of tragedy has led to six films set in the despondent Sea of Trees to be released in this decade alone, some even carrying high-profile stars and directors like Keanu Reeves (47 Ronin) and Gus Van Sant (Sea of Trees). Jose Pedro Lopes’ The Forest of the Lost Souls is not set in Japan but Portugal, and its titular woodland is nondescript enough to not offend the staff of any of its actual national parks, but Lopes’ muted coming-of-age slasher film comes from the connotations it liberally borrows from the legend of Aokigahara.
Filmed in sterile monochrome, with an almost clinical restraint, The Forest of the Lost Souls strives to mask its chosen forest with an ethereal cloak that would hope to convince the viewer something abstruse was lurking behind its utterly mundane locale. The forest itself is rather dense and stretches, thanks to some lovely deep-focus shots, into a seeming oblivion where you can imagine it being an ideal place for suicide attempters to symbolically feel at their most lost and take that final step.
For a film such as this, location is everything when it comes to establishing a particularly uneasy mood, and even with the loaded stoicism, Lopes attempts, with all his static and barren camerawork, to create that feeling of being lost in an uncaring sea of trees never comes across. The characters we see navigating the forest and wandering past previous victims strewn about do so on indicated paths and what looks like hiking trails in a conservation area, making getting lost in the cryptic atmosphere, which it desperately wants, almost impossible.
Speaking of those characters, Ricardo finds himself ambling through the hallowed woodland of his chosen resting place, driven by the recent suicide of his daughter Irene in the same location, the tragedy of which has caused irreparable strain between him, his wife and youngest daughter, Filipa. Aimless and waiting for the nerve to strike him, he stumbles onto the path of a nihilist, Carolina, who waffles constantly on her own suicide, visiting the forest frequently more for fun than anything and treating death like its a lark.
The generational gap between the two supplants into a father-daughter surrogacy built on Ricardo condescending Joana’s assured belief in life being meaningless and her painful precociousness throwing everything back into his face, and a bond of sorts is established. Their conversations become insufferable and pretentious as the teenage Joana has that annoying trait where characters will instantly surmise every detail about a person upon meeting one and where Ricardo can only respond with weathered, “kids these days” complaints. She mocks his choice to commit suicide as cowardice for running from his family; he acts bewildered that someone her age could view death as flippant.
The film had the making of a quirky indie film with an indiscernible tone about this shaky relationship built at such a trying time for both. Joana’s archetype has seen many iterations in the numerous DIY dramedies that come oozing out of film festivals, and I had hoped Lost Souls would dig its heels into this trajectory of two lost souls finding each other at the ends of their ropes. Yet once their dynamic has been established and the quirky bonding had run its course halfway through its brief running time, Lopes jerks the wheel and his film runs right off the road into a rote, flimsy slasher.
The turn is all too sudden, as if a second script was stitched in at the last minute and is not remotely compelling enough to be shocking, but for whatever reason, Lopes threw out all the work he had done establishing the macabre tweeness of their circumstantial friendship and delivered a bland ripoff of The Strangers.
The fascination the film once had with the forest dissipates, and instead the film partakes in some unprompted stalking of a mother and daughter who are loosely linked to what took place 30 minutes ago. A young woman absentmindedly goes about her day as an unexplained figure watches from a distance, in what I assume is the same tactic used in The Strangers but in a far less effective manner. The whole sequence is bereft of tension because as a viewer you are still dumbfounded about how exactly we got to this pitiful slasher for you to be concerned about anyone losing their lives.
The shift is just jarring and baffling, considering all the groundwork Lopes put into the original premise. Prompting one to care about the well being of a character that one has just met is a task Lost Souls is not capable of pulling off.
If Lopes had just stuck with the original premise and made a film about two despondent individuals, divided by an age gap and a polar opposite outlook on life, coming together when they confront death, would it have been a better film? Who is to say? But at the very least, it would have been consistent and not have felt as though it wasted all of the endearing work that it put into its opening in exchange for flaccid shock value.
I cannot stress enough how abrupt the midway genre jump is and how little effort Lost Souls puts into justifying introducing a slasher villain to its second half. This isn’t the only issue with the bland, fake walking tour of a Aokigahara knockoff, but it is by far the largest and most distracting. If you are going to besmirch the dead by turning their final resting place into entertainment, have the decency to stick to a genre before venturing into the pines.
