SUICIDE FOREST (Die beängstigendsten Orte der Welt)

February 2, 2015
Bates’s so-so supernatural thriller has several folks camping in Japan’s famed Aokigahara Jukai, or suicide forest—dubbed “a perfect place to die.” Ethan, the lead, and his fellow campers are mostly types—the girlfriend, the rival, the potential love interest, the coworker, and the Japanese guy who speaks bad English. Like unsympathetic souls in a B-grade horror movie, they choose dumb adventure over common sense and start to get picked off one by one. When the bodies start piling up, Bates (White Lies) raises questions about why people kill themselves or contemplate suicide, but he provides facile responses. He’s better at discussing how people cope with death. His descriptions of the forest, however, aren’t particularly atmospheric, and his efforts to invoke the supernatural—from swinging crucifixes to disorienting dreams—fall flat long before things spiral into a silly last act. What should be a juicy, genre read is pretty toothless.