INTERNATIONAL

war between the Muslims and Serbs without
taking things too seriously. Dark comedies
set during wartime can often be a hard sell
tonally, but A Perfect Day works better than
other recent attempts like Bill Murray’s Rock
the Kasbah, mostly due to Aranoa’s solid writing
and casting.
What’s lacking is much of a story, because
the whole movie is literally about the search
for rope to get that body out of the well, so
it becomes more about the relationships between
unlikely co-workers thrown together
by their situation. Most of the interactions
are enhanced by witty repartee from Del
Toro and Robbins, but the two women aren’t
handled nearly as well, with Katya there
solely as temptation for Mambrú. Thierry’s
never able to adjust to the tonal shifts, going
overboard with her reactions and acting
scared in any given situation, whether appropriate
or not. The inability of the cast to shift
with the changing tone results in an uneven
film whenever we’re reminded of the horrors
of their environment.
Aranoa’s decision to use a mostly rock
soundtrack, complete with vintage Ramones
and Lou Reed, gives A Perfect Day a distinctive
feel that makes it far more enjoyable
than it might have been in the hands of a less
experienced filmmaker, but that music only
does so much to make up for the flimsy plot.
Although it does eventually deliver a satisfying
resolution to that story, the movie feels
slightly padded with unnecessary character
moments which keep it from being nearly as
effective as it could have been.
—Edward Douglas
THE FOREST
GRAMERCY PICTURES/Color/1.85/Dolby Digital/
95 Mins./Rated PG-13
Cast: Natalie Dormer, Taylor Kinney, Yukiyoshi Ozawa,
Eoin Macken.
Directed by Jason Zada.
Written by Ben Ketai, Sarah Cornwell, Nick Antosca.
Produced by Tory Metzger, David S. Goyer, David Linde.
Executive producers: Len Blavatnik, Aviv Giladi, Lawerence
Bender, Andrew Pfeffer.
Director of photography: Mattias Troelstrup.
Production designer: Kevin Phipps.
Editor: Jim Flynn.
Music: Bear McCreary.
Costume designer: Bojana Nikitovic.
A Lava Bear Films and AI-Film production.
The night is dark and not so full of terrors
in “Game of Thrones” star Natalie Dormer’s
first foray into C-grade J-horror.
A decade ago, Hollywood’s
horror-movie
pipeline was clogged
by English-language adaptations
of Japanese
horror films, where
a steady stream of Natalie Dormer
pretty Caucasian
actresses were menaced by ghosts imported
from that Pacific island nation. The cycle
began with Naomi Watts in 2002’s The Ring
and eventually grew to include Sarah Michelle
Geller (2004’s The Grudge), Jennifer Connelly
(2005’s Dark Water), Amber Tamblyn (2006’s
The Grudge 2) and Kristen Bell (2006’s Pulse).
That J-horror remake boomlet has mercifully
died out, but faint echoes can be heard in
The Forest, which uses Japan as a setting—although
the film was shot almost entirely in
Serbia—within which to tell a supernatural
story that, while intensely familiar, isn’t technically
based on an existing film.
Let’s not give The Forest too many bonus
points for originality, though. After all,
screenwriters Ben Ketai, Sarah Cornwell and
Nick Antosca have based the script around a
famous piece of Japanese paranormal lore—a
choice that could be interpreted as culturally
insensitive if one were inclined to think more
deeply about the movie than the filmmakers
obviously have. The story takes its inspiration
from the notoriety surrounding the Aokigahara
Forest, a 14-square-mile “Sea of Trees”
swelling in the shadow of Mount Fuji.
Legend has it that Aokigahara is a
playground for demons, and also houses the
ghosts of the men and women who have
traveled there to end their lives. In fact, the
number of suicides within the forest remains
significantly high to this day, high enough to
make international headlines and require
regular patrols of the area to remove dead
bodies. Employing that setting for an American
horror movie is somewhat akin to a Japanese
film crew shooting a fright flick at one of
America’s most high-profile suicide spots: San
Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
It might have been easier to look past The
Forest’s skeevy appropriation of a culturally
loaded subject had it offered a more compelling
story and, certainly, better scares. But in
those departments, the movie is stridently
generic, despite the spirited efforts of its star,
Natalie Dormer. A British actress tip-toeing
her way into American films after high-profile
roles on internationally successful TV series
like “Game of Thrones” and “The Tudors,”
Dormer has a wickedly entertaining screen
presence that’s all too often stifled in the role
of Sara, who travels to Aokigahara on a mission
to find her missing-and-presumed-dead
twin sister, Jess (also played by Dormer).
Already unnerved by being a stranger in a
strange land—her fish-out-of-water moments
include being served live, wriggling sushi
and having a homeless man bang on her taxi
window and cackle hysterically—Sara only
grows grimmer and more determined as she
reaches Aokigahara. On the outskirts of the
forest, another conveniently attractive (and
even more conveniently American) traveler,
Aiden (Taylor Kinney) becomes her friend,
guide…and maybe executioner? Don’t worry,
that’s not a spoiler; in a psychological-horror
two-hander like this, that kind of potential
betrayal is inevitable.
But psychology and horror proves to
be terrain that the screenwriting team and
director Jason Zada struggle to navigate effectively.
It’s established early on that there’s
something not quite right about Sara, who
survived a childhood tragedy that supposedly
affected Jess in more pronounced ways. Once
inside Aokigahara, those internal demons
claw their way out of her subconscious, and
further eat away at her sense of reality. Unfortunately,
Zada doesn’t demonstrate a firm
enough grasp of the film’s visual language to
convincingly track how Sara’s mind is warping;
we get the usual jump scares and foreboding
shots of a darkened forest, but there’s little
texture or genuine terror in his evocation of
this supposedly haunted locale.
He also misses out on realizing a Lynchian
element that’s embedded in a script
that’s otherwise closer to Wrong Turn, one
that ties into Sara’s understanding of her
own identity. In fact, the closing moments
of The Forest seem to push the story into
Mulholland Dr. or Lost Highway territory, a
leap that Zada isn’t prepared to make. Like
its heroine, The Forest spends much of its
runtime lost in the woods, unable to find the
path to a scarier, more satisfying feature.
—Ethan Alter
MOONWALKERS
ALCHEMY/Color/1.85/107 Mins./Rated R
Cast: Ron Perlman, Rupert Grint, Robert Sheehan,
Eric Lampaert, Kerry Shale, Tom Audenaert.
Directed by Antoine Bardou-Jacquet.
Written by Dean Craig.
Produced by Georges Bermann.
Director of photography: Glynn Speeckaert.
Production designers: Patrick Dechesne,
Alain-Pascal Housiaux.
Editors: Bill Smedley, Chris Gill.
Music: Kasper Winding, Alex Gopher.
Costume designers: Agnes Dubois, Christophe Pidre.
A Partizan Films production.
Despite an amusing central gimmick,
this Space Age showbiz comedy is curiously
airless.
Among the many wild theories mentioned
in Room 237, Rodney Ascher’s wonderfully
wacked-out deconstruction of Stanley
Kubrick’s The Shining, is the suggestion that
the eccentric director embedded his adaptation
of Stephen King’s seminal horror novel
with references to the “fact” that he helped
the American government fake the Apollo
11 moon landing in 1969. You know, that one
where Neil Armstrong famously talked about
taking a small step for a man, and a giant leap
for mankind. As the hypothesis—advanced
in Room 237 by Shining-ologist Jay Weidner,
but originated well before him—goes, NASA
needed a victory to carry America over the
Space Race finish line ahead of the USSR.
With Apollo 11’s chance of success appearing
uncertain, officials turned to the filmmaker
whose 1968 opus, 2001: A Space Odyssey,
made moviegoers feel as if they were taking a
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