825 FOREST ROAD - Mark Reviews Movies

825 Forest Road, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 3, 2025

Everybody in the sleepy little town in 825 Forest Road knows that something sinister is afoot. There have been rumors of ghostly sightings. The town's history is full of suicides, including, it seems, the deaths of the entire town council in 1980. Everyone knows all of this, and most people would rather keep it quiet—not to save the place's reputation or anything like that, but simply to just keep going and to hope that nothing like those past tragedies will happen again.

Such is the background of writer/director Stephen Cognetti's movie, and it is, unfortunately, more haunting than anything that occurs in the forefront of this story. That revolves around a trio of newcomers to the town of Ashland Falls who realize that something is very wrong in the village and, more specifically, their new house, only to keep realizing that fact over and over again.

The bigger picture of this narrative is intriguing, because it has some ideas about how people respond—or, more appropriately, don't react—to tragedy, especially when it keeps repeating itself. The inhabitants of Ashland Falls are almost blasé about the existence of a vengeful ghost in their midst—a terrorizing figure that has been part of the official but hidden record of the town since the 1940s and has figured into its unofficial history in the decades after that.

At one point, Chuck (Joe Falcone), the first protagonist in Cognetti's oddly split triptych of a narrative, goes to the local library to research the town. He sees a crying teenage girl, whom we know to do be dead, and a pile of books in one section of the library, when no one else is in the building. While the librarians on duty are a bit surprised initially, they eventually react as if having to deal with a potential ghost and the vestige of a supernatural happening is just part of the routine of living and working in Ashland Falls. When we soon learn about the event that the pile of books suggests, that attitude is even more unsettling.

Instead of focusing on the ways of this town, however, Cognetti's script stays close to Chuck, his wife Maria (Elizabeth Vermilyea), and his younger sister Isabelle (Kathryn Miller), who move to the town after the death of the siblings' mother in a car accident, in which Isabelle was the driver, for some quiet and to make things easier for the young woman. A vague prologue, set in a different house in town, lets us know that there is a ghost hanging around and giving people frights, and when the characters aren't exploring the more interesting past of Ashland Falls and manner of its residents, the movie more or less repeats the same scare tactics.

Much of those are, thankfully, more subtle than we might anticipate. Cognetti plays with camera movement here in a neat way, giving us shots of lengthy stillness, such as looking through a doorway or around a corner at some room, and punctuating it with a quick pan, such as the door closing or a person moving away from that space. In a split second within that motion, a shadowy figure can be spotted just before the shot ends. The effect is more subliminal than startling, and that approach builds suspense instead of paying off every potential scare before the movie prepares us for them.

Cognetti's technique, then, is fine in theory, even if the screenplay lets down the material on a couple of significant ways. The first, of course, is that Chuck, Maria, and Isabelle's story isn't nearly as captivating as some of the background details on display here. Chuck basically spends his third of the tale trying to figure out the town's past, while Isabelle pretty much does the same by way of her new friend Luke (Darin F. Earl II), who seems to know a lot about and get involved in this ghost business for a guy who just wants to stay out of it. Meanwhile, Maria is oblivious to even the notion of the supernatural, apparently, leading to an amusing scene in which a ghost appears behind her while she's doing an online seamstress show for an audience that keeps trying to warn her.

None of this is as compelling as a scene at a kind-of support group for those who believe in the ghost and want to do something about it or another at an art gallery, where management has to clear the building after something spontaneously appears in one of the paintings. The mythology we eventually discover about the ghost and its motive isn't novel, obviously, but the way in which the town and its denizens are so accepting and almost practical about that ghost's existence and actions is deviously funny, as well as a bit insightful.

Instead of digging into that, though, 825 Forest Road gives us the usual horror stuff and establishes a constantly backtracking narrative that means the story literally repeats itself. The legitimate eeriness of the movie remains in the backdrop.

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