Forest of the Lost Souls is a Portuguese horror film about is a dense and remote forest, a popular place for suicide, where on a summer morning, two strangers meet.
Most by now, at least those with any social media presence or a little horror film knowledge, have heard of the suicide forest in Japan, though it turns out they aren’t the only one with claim to such sorrowful settings. Portugal has one too, at least according José Pedro Lopes‘ latest intensely creepy little slice of madness, Forest of the Lost Souls (Original: A Floresta das Almas Perdidas), a brief yet harrowing experience in black & white that at its dark core, is a little disconcerning.
An elderly man named Ricardo (Jorge Mota) saunters into the woods along a path marked ‘suicides,’ and makes his way to a secluded rock where he unsheathes a large hunting knife with great intent. However, he is stopped by a young woman named Carolina (Daniela Love), who has also come to this spot for the same reason, but prefers he move on to somewhere else. Shocked a girl so young would want to end it all, Ricardo speaks with her, and finds she is rather prepared – more than he – to take her life and leave behind a solid message. She agrees to help him as well. We then shift elsewhere where something rather menacing lurks, an especially dark connection made between it and the disparate couple in the forest, changing everything.
A couple of years back, Jason Zada‘s The Forest was set in Japan’s infamous Aokigahara Forest, the film a disappointing chiller that had few rewarding frights, clinging all to readily to a host of clichés that stripped it of any real significance. What Lopes does with his film is avoid finding reason behind the popularity of the Portuguese site and instead, spin the whole thing ’round so it’s not at all what it seems like it’s supposed to be. Dedicating nearly half of the film’s refreshingly short runtime of 70-minutes to luring us into the trap, we are convinced this early talky little treatise on the human condition is destined to be a sort of existential critique on the modern world where a self-inflicted exit makes the most sense.
However, Lopes, who wrote the screenplay, has other plans, and to even suggest where it goes would be almost cruel on my part in telling. I will say that the best part of any horror film has always been the moments in anticipation of violence rather than the actual act of it, and Lopes clearly understands this, the last half of the film almost unbearable in its sinisterly playful buildup to, well, I can’t say.
This is not a slasher film, and it’s nearly unfair to even label it ‘horror,’ the movie much more an exercise in psychological trauma than gore. It has a predatory nature to it with Lopez using jarring electronic beats (by Emanuel Grácio) in desynchronized cues to keep us off balance, and while it might not fully make good on its premise, with a few repeated moments that sort of sap a bit of the sting, there’s no stepping away from Lopes’s visually-arresting storytelling style, the crisp black & white lending the whole affair a kind of metaphorical devil in the dark feel.
This won’t be for everyone, though few psychological horror films are, their capacity for interpretation making many source for derision and division. I greatly appreciate Lopes’ experimentation, and more so, how it left me feeling when it was over. I was unsure and unsettled, and that’s not something that happens often enough. Did I like it? That’s not the point. That it moved me in weird ways is.