The Forest 2016

The Forest 2016
1h 49min | Drama , Fantasy , Horror | 9 March 2016 (USA)
Storyline:
A new teacher arrives at a small village in rural Thailand. He has just left the monkhood and has taken a job at the local school in a quest to discover life outside the monastery. He finds that one of his pupils is a mute girl who is being bullied by the other children in the class. Both the teacher and the girl must face the challenges and cruelties of the real world. The girl retreats into a fantasy world, finding solace in the forest with a strange wild boy. The teacher struggles to bring her back, whilst at the same time himself questioning the world of reality. The worlds of fantasy and reality clash with tragic consequences.
User review:
I wasn't quite sure what genre THE FOREST was for the first fifty minutes. It seemed to be a fable for children, with morals on the evil of bullying, as well as befriending ghosts and goblins in the forest. A little clumsy with the set-up, but that was all soon forgiven when the second half of this movie ventured into a dark mysterious path with some violence and other adult themes. So it eventually had my attention, and I was glad that my finger didn't press the stop button earlier.
The two main protagonists, the teacher and the silent student, were well crafted characters that held you in there until the story took an interesting turn for that second half. More importantly was the performances by the actors that made these characters shine. The child actress, Wannasa Wintawong, took the limelight, along with her companion, Tanapol Kamkunkam, who played the feral boy, protector of the forest. The two played off each other so well that it gave the film a sense of neorealism.