The Warped Forest (2011)

Directed by: Shunichiro Miki | 82 minutes | comedy | Actors: Rinko Kikuchi, Yoshiyuki Morishita, Fumi Nikaido, Yôji Tanaka

After 82 minutes of this film you won’t know what is real or a dream, whether you are a giant or a dwarf and whether something valuable is growing in your navel. You still don’t know what you just watched. It is quite difficult to tell exactly what the story is, so the Japanese film ‘The Warped Forest’ is more of an experience than a conventional film. It is also reminiscent of associative Avant-Garde films, where the filmmaker is actually an artist and feels free to allow elements to follow one another associatively, creating a dream-like film. Fortunately, ‘The Warped Forest’ is a little less vague, but still hard to follow.

Three students disappear into thin air and are teleported into a forest. We also end up in that alternative world, and there we follow a number of characters. The world is absurd and at the same time has recognizable worldly things. The people in that world are obsessed with some kind of fruit, which they get under the influence of. The fruits grow between the legs of wood nymphs, and have a vagina on them. When one licks it, it secretes the sweet substance that makes them drunk. This is just one of the many absurd sexual references in this film.

There is also such a thing as time tinkering, in which people can control their dreams. Opinions are divided on how this works, some say it’s a time-rise, others say it’s just a dream. What is clear is that it costs a lot of ‘pocos’, and you might get cursed or just disappear.

The acting skills are mediocre and sometimes downright bad, and there is little that is innovative or special in the camera work, editing and sound. But the three directors went all out and probably had a lot of fun during the filming, and it shows. ‘The Warped Forest’ really thrives on the bizarre surprises that keep popping up, and the absurd visual jokes. With films from other cultures, messages and references are often inevitably lost due to a lack of knowledge of the culture in question. You can’t shake the feeling that you are missing something, like the story or the clue, and the question of what the hell you are looking at keeps nagging. Still, the absurdity of the fantasy makes it fun to watch. ‘The Warped Forest’ is so vague that it elevates illogic to art.