We’ve all heard of the many suicides that happen in Japan’s famous Aokigahara “Sea of Trees” Forest at the base of Mt. Fuji. There’s a legend that if one goes into some parts of this Jukai, as it’s known in Japan, that you won’t be able to get out. When a mysterious box appears to a group of friends living close to the forest, a curse spreads, releasing the dangers hidden in the Sea of Trees.
When this movie popped up on my recommended Prime Video list, I read “from the director of The Grudge…) and immediately added it on my watchlist. Nothing would keep me from watching not only another Japanese horror film, but one from one of the greatest directors spanning two continents! Since I was in the middle of moving house, it took me three days to finish — it is almost two hours long, afterall. And I’m sad to say I was kind of underwhelmed with it all. It felt like forever.
And I think that’s because there seemed to be a bunch of cool ideas that were meshed together in such a way that it didn’t make sense. For example, we have three main ideas here: a child-grabber at the opening, a cursed box in the middle, and some forest monsters at the end. It was explained how they all linked together, but it still feels like they shouldn’t have been. All three ideas are enough to hold up on their own; putting them together made this movie not only drag along, but make me confused about some of the choices made.
I’m not sure if it was because I watched this over a span of a few days, but I had to reference IMDB, AsianWiki, and some other reviews to make sure I knew what was happening in the story. Apparently the main premise is that anyone who enters this accursed forest is destined to stay there (aka die). Apparently, many years ago, villages surrounding the area would leave their “undesirables” in the forest to die. Those people didn’t die, and instead they made their own village with crazed rituals involving cutting off fingers and putting them in a box to be fed on later. Those vengeful spirits haunt the area, dragging others in and never letting them escape. A family living nearby finds the box and is reacquainted with their childhood trauma as the box seemingly causes bad things to happen to those around them. There’s talk of a child-grabber, monsters, a missing YouTuber, and of course, more death.
And all of that sounds cool, but it is just so long. So drawn-out. So… boring. And it’s really a shame because the ideas and effects in the movie are pretty note-worthy. We all know about the suicide forest, but had never heard of its supposed original purpose to rid the area of the crazed and infirm. We were excited to hear about a box that keeps reappearing and is rumored to cause misfortune. Child kidnappings? I thought we’d get a ton of that from opening sequence. And then there are the monsters in the Sea of Trees; amazing creatures that are part zombie, part person, part tree. They chase and grab those trying to flee, only to morph around them, mangling their victim’s bodies into a twisted shrine engulfing them in the plant life itself. Bruh, that’s a whole movie alone!
But instead we get small doses of this in between giant gaps of dull psych lingo (because of course the main character — who can see ghosts — is schizophrenic), dramatic, unnecessary drama between friends, and characters who are just lifeless. If I didn’t feel the need to finish this movie, I wouldn’t have. Alas, my love for J-horror is too strong not to.
Was Suicide Forest Village a bad movie? No; it definitely had cool portions. My problem is its length and lack of getting to the point. It’s a case of too many cooks in the kitchen (where the amount of cool ideas are the cooks, and the kitchen is the whole movie). Split this bad boy up into two or three crisp 90-minute movies and we’d have a much better time.
What did you think of Suicide Forest Village? Let us know in the comments!
