One of the first movies I ever got to review for ScreenRant was a little film called Blackwater Lane. This was a personally historic moment, not just in my budding film criticism career, but because I deemed Blackwater Lane one of the worst movies I had ever seen – a difficult feat given my dense viewing history. The movie became an iconic part of my internal media library, so it seemed kind of perfect when the opportunity came around to review another street name-based thriller, 825 Forest Road

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Surely, this would be a far superior entry into the street name movie niche subgenre, right? In a sense, my playful ᴀssumptions were correct. 825 Forest Road is indeed a more competent movie. That said, I found that the Shudder original horror film had far more similarities to the misgivings of Blackwater Lane than I would have hoped for.

Extremely location-focused — yet lacking a quality cartographer, as becomes critical — 825 Forest Road unwraps the story of a sibling duo recovering from a family tragedy. Chuck and his younger sister, Isabel, start discovering strange things in the house and neighborhood that Chuck and his wife Maria move to. From there, director Stephen Cognetti (whose previous credits include the entire Hell House LLC franchise) attempts, and often fails, to take us on a psychological ghost journey that addresses issues of grief and generational trauma.

The Film’s Structure Does Little To Serve Its Plot

In Fact, It Left Me Frustrated

After a cold open that introduces the main tone, 825 Forest Road introduces the first of what will be a four-part structure. There are some movies where “this has been done before” is a generalized complaint about a film’s triteness. It takes a special kind of film for this gripe to be literal. 825 Forest Road is the latter.

One of my biggest complaints with Blackwater Lane was that it kept repeating the same scene as shorthand for the protagonist’s psychological torture. 825 Forest Road does not rehash scenes for one character, but three. In an effort to show us different perspectives, the film literally re-does scenes in its “Chuck,” “Isabel,” and “Maria” segments. In concept, this could be an interesting way to explore the varied interpretations of the same event, especially crucial when it involves grief response and supernatural elements.

In practice, the film is mundane, repeтιтive, and full of the same beats. Though it seems to understand its own goals better in the “Maria” section, giving us access to part of a scene that we were not privy to with the “Isabel” perspective, this device typically creates an exhausting amount of overlap that sees entire dialogue sequences redone, word-for-word, with little new information. This disrupts the film’s rhythms and rate of reveal, drawing its suspense simply by flooding the film with redundancies rather than committing to engaging plotting and tension-building.

The Sibling Relationship Is What Works Best

But I Needed More Of This

I had almost dismissed the film entirely by the time the “Isabel” section (Part Two) redid so many scenes, but it is in the second act that 825 Forest Road shines brightest. While inelegantly acted by leads Joe Falcone and Kathryn Miller, there is a dialogue scene that hints at some interesting history between the siblings. Chuck also undermines Isabel in ways that mirror his later dismissal of his own wife, Maria, adding to the character’s depth. While I wish the film had explored these dynamics further, I can recognize its attempt to dig deeply here.

Most Glaringly, 825 Forest Road Is An Irresponsible Portrayal Of Mental Illness

It Plays Into Bad Horror Tropes

Its technical and acting issues aside, the film’s biggest problem is that the theme it is trying to address — mental illness and suicide epidemics — is the thing it ends up doing the greatest disservice to. From Psycho to Split, horror has faced challenges portraying mental health issues for decades. In the latest attempt, Maria voices her struggle with bipolar disorder. While I will not spoil the ending, the film really struggles to avoid making a demonized monster out of mental illness, portraying sufferers as violent.

In fact, the whole feature tends towards making light of themes of suicide. There is an effort to demonize bullying as a driver of suicide, but the weakly plotted ghost device seems to make suicide out to be something spooky and mystery worthy rather than a debilitating and traumatic tragedy for a community. Ultimately, I found this thematic treatment to be incredibly irresponsible, effectively ruining 825 Forest Road.