825 Forest Road review
The director of the Hell House LLC series focuses on the wrong part of 825 Forest Road.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
825 Forest Road
Directed by Stephen Cognetti
Written by Stephen Cognetti
Starring Joe Falcone, Kathryn Miller, Elizabeth Vermilyea, Darin F. Earl II, Lorenzo Beronilla, Claudia Langmaid and Madeleine Garcia
825 Forest Road Review
Director Stephen Cognetti has been a great friend to Shudder. His Hell House LLC series is a consistent highlight of the Shudder schedule. With a new iteration on the way soon (after a brief stop in theaters) …Cognetti brings something a bit different to the horror streaming service to help pass the time. 2023’s Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor was, in my opinion, a big leap forward for the filmmaker. Origins saw the director hold a masterfully consistent tone. It was one of the most genuinely frightening experiences in recent years. Finding out that Cognetti was dropping a ghost story on Shudder was an incredibly exciting prospect. One that, unfortunately, only somewhat pays off.
There’s plenty of genuinely creepy content here…Cognetti knows how to present horror imagery. The problem comes from the script’s failure to focus on the most interesting aspect of its story. There’s a decades long townwide mystery afoot in 825 Forest Road. One that has consumed many people…and cost just as many their lives. A curse that they desperately want lifted…but find themselves incapable of tracking down the origin of. The movie opens with one such townsperson meeting her fate. We later learn that she had cracked the mystery of Ashland Falls…and died before she could tell anyone about it.
That mystery has proven especially difficult for the people of Ashland Falls due to a purposeful reckoning seventy years earlier. Town borders were redrawn…streets were renamed…and every piece of information was lost to history. What people have been searching for since is simple. The home of Helen Foster. The spirit who has haunted Ashland Falls for years.
That’s a damn fine setup for a ghost story. The town vs the ghost they have to operate in secret against…a long-term investigation into how to find and stop her…brilliant stuff. 825 Forest Road isn’t as interested in it as it should be. That’s not totally fair, of course. The movie comes up with the idea…teases it out…and eventually culminates with it. The problem is how a story that presents itself in four chapters chooses to utilize its time during the first three.
Our gateway into the world of 825 Forest Road is a family of three who unwittingly move into the cursed town. Chuck (Joe Falcone) and his wife Maria (Elizabeth Vermilyea) buy the home. Chuck’s younger sister Isabel (Kathryn Miller) lives with them following the death of their mother. Each of the first three chapters in 825 Forest Road are told from the perspective of one of these characters. It’s a decent idea on paper…and it does allow the movie to present information from different sources and in new ways…but it all ends up feeling more than a little repetitive. Strange things are inevitably going to happen to all three…and they all react to it pretty much the same way. No matter the intentions…that’s just the same thing happening over and over.
Chuck and Isabel lean their curiosities more towards the story of Helen Foster and finding the location of her home. Maria’s segment is more of a haunting (though that is a part of all three) …and the most effective horror segment in 825 Forest Road. She has a creepy mannequin. Creepier than most. If you are at all familiar with Cognetti’s use of clowns in Hell House LLC…you know how effective he can be with this device. Maria’s section feels different enough from the other two to work…even if it isn’t allowing the overall story to progress by simply repeating days for a third time. The problem is having Chuck and Maria run the same track one after the other. It slows 825 Forest Road to a near halt. A third concept to differentiate the segments could have elevated the concept. Instead, it just feels stuck.
Eventually, the story finds its way back to its most interesting idea. The narrative livens up considerably. It’s easy to understand why Cognetti chooses the format he does for 825 Forest Road. He provides enough great horror imagery to cover for the lack of inertia in the first three quarters of the story. But his own great concept does him a disservice. Once you have attended a clandestine town meeting about the entity haunting the town…you just aren’t that interested in watching the third member of a house have their own individual experience with it. You want to be a part of an investigative task force Hell bent on freeing the town from her ghostly wrath. Even the most effective spooky moments come with an asterisk as you wonder if there isn’t something more important to do.
Scare Value
Stephen Cognetti brings his confidence from Hell House LLC Origins…but can’t find the most interesting story in 825 Forest Road. Instead of mining the town’s long investigation into the history and location of their haunting…825 Forest Road gets bogged down with repeating itself. There’s some effective horror imagery here…but the juice is barely worth the long, slow squeeze.
2.5/5
825 Forest Road Link
Streaming on Shudder
