Review | The Forest of Love film review: carnage and debauchery in Netflix crime epic from Sion Sono
- This Japanese film is two-and-a-half hours of outrageous imagery, tangled flashbacks, mayhem and murder
- It’s a sex- and blood-soaked story of teenagers who fall under the spell of an evil older con man
3/5 stars
Prolific Japanese provocateur Sion Sono revisits a number of his favourite themes, including murder, mayhem and manipulation in sprawling epic The Forest of Love. Inspired by a series of real-life murders in the late 1990s, the film follows a group of impressionable young misfits, who fall under the spell of Kippei Shiina’s charismatic con artist.
Mitsuko (Eri Kamataki) and Taeko (Kyoko Hinami) are former classmates, estranged after a high school tragedy, who are reunited when they are coerced into shooting a movie for aspiring filmmakers Shin (Shinnosuke Mitsushima), Jay (Young Dais), and Fukami (Dai Hasegawa).
After Joe Murata (Shiina), a sadistic middle-aged shyster, attempts to seduce the timid Mitsuko, the silk-tongued Svengali quickly inserts himself into the group, wrests control of the production, and forces them all into a life of crime and violent submission.
Beneath Sono’s endlessly lurid veneer lurks a cautionary tale of vulnerable youth and fractured families, but, as the heir presumptive to Takashi Miike’s extreme indie throne, the director has always favoured sensationalism over substance.