Wild Eye Releasing, with
sales and distribution expertise provided by MVD Entertainment Group, has
picked Oct. 9 for the domestic DVD and Blu-ray debut of Portuguese filmmaker José
Pedro Lopes’ Forest of the Lost Souls.
Arthouse, with shades of
Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal … filmed in glorious black and white with
stark images and a sense of emptiness and foreboding.
Or, genre film, with a
twisted mystery and a cunning killer … take your pick.
Ricardo (Jorge Mota) is a
family man who has reached the end of the line.
He’s decided to go to a special place to kill himself. It is the local forest (filmed in and around
Caramulo, Portugal) where suicides are common.
Once committed to his
course of action, he drives there, parks his car at the picnic area and wanders
into the woods and eventually comes to the perfect spot. Suddenly a voice calls out to him, it is
another would-be suicide, a young woman by the name of Carolina (Daniela Love). They have interrupted each other, so they
decide to make the best of it and postpone death’s journey to talk to each
other.
You are about 25 to 30
minutes into the film, the main characters have been introduced and you are
definitely in the arthouse realm. It is
here that everything goes in a dramatically different direction and suddenly
you have landed in a horror tale.
Stop reading if you don’t
want to know what follows … just circle Oct. 9 and pick up either a DVD or
Blu-ray edition of the film.
As it turns out, one of
the two is not what they seem. Carolina,
may or may not have been in the woods that day to end it all (out of remorse
for all the horrible things she had done), but when Ricardo dropped by that all
changed.
She calms him, comforts
him and offers him an easy solution to his misery. And then kills him, but doesn’t stop
there. Our little wood nymph heads over
to his house and slaughters the rest of his family!
Forest of Lost Souls is an amazing mixed-genre foreign-language
import. Bonus features include
commentary from filmmaker José Pedro Lopes, deleted scenes, a featurette
devoted to “Fight Rehearsals” and the short film titled Saint John’s Night.
Forest of the Lost Souls is presented in Portuguese with English
subtitles.
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