Studio: Wild Eye Releasing
Director: Jose Pedro Lopes
Writer: Jose Pedro Lopes
Producer: Ana Almeida
Stars: Daniela Love, Jorge Mota, Mafalda Banquart, Ligia Roque, Tiago Jacome, Lilia Lopes
Review Score:
Summary:
A despondent man’s life takes an unexpected turn after he meets a strange young woman in a Portuguese forest known for suicides.
Review:
Japan’s Aokigahara isn’t the world’s only so-called “suicide forest.” Portugal has one too, and it serves as the central setting for Jose Pedro Lopes’ “The Forest of the Lost Souls.”
Feeling despondent over having failed his family, older man Ricardo goes alone to the titular location to take his life. He put his plan together rather hastily, having brought only a knife to accompany the waffling willpower that has him second-guessing if he can actually go through with ending everything.
Weirdly, Ricardo happened upon the only spot in the woods occupied by another living person. Caroline, an enigmatic amalgam of goth, hipster, emo, and millennial personality types, ditched a music festival with friends to patiently mull over her own self-inflicted end.
Caroline appears far cheerier about her impending death than Ricardo is about his, to the point that Ricardo can’t comprehend why someone so youthfully vibrant wants to die. After resolving their brief territorial dispute, Caroline invites Ricardo on a walk through the trees to visit the bodies no longer breathing. The duo’s subsequent trek, as well as their conversations about suicide and their families, eventually takes at least one of them down an unpredictable path that wasn’t part of the plan.
“The Forest of the Lost Souls” opens with narration exclaiming, “sadness will last forever,” which we’re told Van Gogh uttered to his brother Theo before he died. Montage moments introduce a woman in white who poetically drinks poison before wading into water. Once she collapses, the camera cuts to opening credits over stop-motion animation featuring an eerie forest diorama crafted from newspaper trees. In other words, evident hallmarks make it abundantly clear from the outset that the film follows a blueprint for building an arthouse aesthetic.
Like Caroline, the movie chronicling her isn’t everything initial appearances imply. Around the half-hour mark, when it seems the film has irreversibly committed its audience to a lengthy contemplation of life and death as explored through a conversational character study, “The Forest of the Lost Souls” suddenly hangs a sharp right, transforming into a more traditional thriller. The tonal shift from reflectively philosophical to shockingly suspenseful offers a fresh reason to engage with the narrative, or reengage if your attention drifted away while Ricardo and Caroline introspectively mused.
“The Forest of the Lost Souls” intrigues as an artfully experimental thriller, although its accompanying message doesn’t come across so clearly. The overall mood isn’t as depressingly melancholy as one might presume given the subject matter. Through Caroline’s mystique, surprising buoyancy lifts the visually gloomy atmosphere. But as for what the metaphors deliberately mean to say with the bookended revisit of the Van Gogh quote, close-up of a blackened Barbie doll wearing a string noose, or several of Caroline’s more confounding actions during the second half, well, that’s open to interpretation. Maybe that’s the point, presuming the film definitively has one.
Black-and-white cinematography similarly hits and misses. As expected, the bleak palette washes imagery in grayness befitting the somber thematic texture. Except by shooting digitally, blacks don’t have the rich shadows or sharp contrast that comes from actual film. In tandem with a great deal of scenery lit from available light, a muted two-dimensionality keeps the movie looking flat, which reflects on its feel.
Running only 70-ish minutes, “The Forest of the Lost Souls” certainly doesn’t feel long, yet it also doesn’t need that full span to push its plot or its perspective across. Part of the reason why Caroline’s movements appear so unmotivated down the back stretch relates to how much meandering goes on with no immediately understood significance.
This observation applies to “The Forest of the Lost Souls” as a whole. Its slowly simmered pot heats requisite ingredients for concocting a grounded little horror film inside an examination of death and self-identity. It’s the recipe where that mixture becomes muddled.
With too much of certain elements and not enough of others, “The Forest of the Lost Souls” erects an uneven bridge between auteur and mainstream sensibilities. Without planting a flag confidently in either territory, the viewer is abandoned to mine his/her own value, provided s/he even finds the unusual movie appealing at all.
NOTE: The film’s Portuguese title is “A Floresta das Almas Perdidas.”
Review Score: 55
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