Last night I had a chance to watch The Forest starring Natalie Dormer. I considered seeing this movie in theaters, but decided to wait for the dvd release. I’m kind of picky about which horror movies I see in theaters, I also don’t always get a chance to catch movies at my local theater. The Forest comes out on dvd and blu-ray this Tuesday so I thought I would give it a shot in the comfort of my own home, which was definitely a better plan than seeing it in the theater.

When the movie started I honestly felt like I was watching the trailer. Here’s what you need to know, Natalie Dormer plays not one, but two characters in this movie. She initially appears as Sara who has gone to Japan to find her missing twin sister Jess, who disappeared while taking her class on a trip through the infamous Suicide Forest. We get to see her as Jess in one flashback and again later in the movie, but primarily she’s Sara. She decides to explore the forest in search of her sister with the help of a guide named Aiden. There’s another guide, but he leaves pretty early on. A young schoolgirl also appears at one point to help Sara in her search for Jess.

Okay so seriously you could watch the trailer and then find a clip of the end of this movie, like the last ten minutes, and be completely fine. I felt like the movie just dragged a lot. Actually I thought it dragged so much that I sort of zoned out at one point. I was tempted to just fast forward, but that seemed like cheating, but only because I planned to review the movie. I just couldn’t bring myself to care about what was going on. Sara was frequently hallucinating and the scares I was expecting just didn’t happen. Much of the plot attempted to connect back to the death of Sara and Jess’s parents when they were six years old. Early in the movie Sara says that they were killed in a hit and run, but as she tells the story we as the audience see something much different.

What happened was far more traumatizing and Sara reveals that only Jess saw it. Except she somehow knows exactly what the scene looked like because she hallucinates it later in the forest. I actually read a full synopsis of the movie while the movie was playing to see if I could figure out what was going on with the plot and that didn’t help. I get that Sara felt guilty, but it didn’t seem like the sort of guilt that spirits would be able to use against her. The ending was also just odd, if you can’t tell I really just wasn’t into this movie.

I personally thought that maybe one of the girls had died when they were kids and this was one of those split personality style plots or maybe Sara was the reason her parents died and Jess lured her into the forest by pretending to disappear in order to kill her. Those were the two plots that I dreamed up while watching the movie. I just wasn’t scared watching this movie and based on the trailer I was just expecting a lot more than actually happened.

If you saw The Forest let us know your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter, @thenerdygirlexp. You can also find me on Twitter, @kleffnotes, on my blog, kleffnotes.wordpress.com, on my kleffnotes YouTube channel, and I run The Nerdy Girl Express Snapchat, thenerdygirlexp. I also post iZombie themed recipes on the iZombie Support Group site.