Feb. 5
To his credit, Shimizu creates a nightmarish forest world that reminds us why, in certain lights and moods, tree branches can look like clawing hands and the trees themselves become ominous beings that threaten and loom.
It helps that his main setting is Aokigahara, the so-called
jukai (sea of trees) at the foot of Mount Fuji that has become notorious as a magnet for the suicidal. It has also inspired several films, including the widely panned 2015 Gus Van Sant drama, “The Sea of Trees.”
With its lumpy, moss-covered volcanic surfaces and dense growth of spindly, twisted trees, Aokigahara is forbidding and creepy, though the urban legends that have grown up around it, which the film regards as sober fact, are pure fiction (at least one hopes).