Stephen Cognetti’s 825 Forest Road (2025) is a character-driven horror drama that’s pretending to be something else. Focusing heavily on a hideous mannequin and a twitchy ghost clad in mourning (think Sadako meets The Woman in Black), the trailer seems to promise a jump scare bonanza. But the film itself is actually much more subdued. This may leave some horror fans wanting more; I, on the other hand, wanted even less: I wish that Cognetti had dropped the flashy effects altogether, since they only distract from the film’s real strength: its deft exploration of volatile interpersonal dynamics. Cognetti excels at orchestrating cringy drama–crafting sequences so uncomfortable that you can’t look away–but he’s less adept at creating and staging an interesting monster, often scavenging from the recycle bin of horror cliche. And what’s more, I suspect he knows this. Throughout the film, there are what seem to be deliberate decisions to confound cinematic norms, a kind of self-conscious turning away from the visual image in favor of the austere conversation. These unorthodox moves are enough to keep me–a cynical horror fan who’s tired of J-horror trickle down–deeply engaged, and I found myself immersed in a movie that the trailer had prepared me to dismiss. 

825 Forest Road opens with Chuck, his wife Maria, and his sister Isabel moving into an old house in the small town of Ashland Falls. Their coming together as a family unit is the result of a recent tragedy: Three months earlier, the siblings’ mother died in a car wreck, and Isabel, who was driving, is consumed by guilt and grief. In an attempt to support her through this crisis and mitigate his own regret–he had been estranged from his family for years–Chuck has uprooted Maria from her life in the city and taken a job at Ashland University, so that Isabel–who will be attending the school–can recover in a stable home. But Ashland may not be the safest place for her. As he soon learns from neighbors, the town is cursed by the ghost of Helen Foster, a woman from the 1940s who, in the modern day, has it out for depressed teens, haunting them until they commit suicide. The only way to stop Helen is to find the house where she lived–the titular 825 Forest Road–and destroy it, which is harder than it sounds because the address has been expunged from contemporary town maps. Can Chuck track it down before the ghost destroys his family?  

The biggest problem with this film is the ghost of Helen Foster, whose derivative look and nonsensical history threaten to sink the entire production. The legend of Helen goes like this: When she discovered that her daughter, Mary, was being viciously tormented by a classmate, she contacted everyone involved–the school’s administrators and the student’s parents–but no one would help, and eventually, Mary committed suicide. Unhinged by her daughter’s death, Helen murdered the bully and the bully’s family before killing herself. A sad story to be sure, but it seems like an isolated case of revenge, a directed attack on the people who made her child’s life hell. Why would her desire for vengeance extend beyond the original perpetrators and time period to target all of Ashland’s depressed teens for eternity? And kids struggling with mental health issues–given how closely they align with her daughter’s demographic–are the least obvious target of Helen’s wrath; you would expect her to sympathize with them, not catalyze their self-destruction. In other words, the logic of her backstory is incoherent. Rather than create continuity between the past and the present, it introduces narrative inconsistencies that distract from the film’s broader themes. And maybe I’m cynical but the decision to deploy bullying here feels like a reach for relevance, an easy way to garner sympathy for Helen by injecting a topical subject. 

The film’s plot seems a little exploitative, and so too does its obvious borrowing from horror trends that, while once spooky, are now well past their prime. The clearest influence is J-horror: Helen’s movements are staccato, jerky, and always accompanied by the sinister sound of bone crunching. If her unnatural lurching is pure Sadako, her 19th-century mourning gown could have been torn from the back of Jennet Humfrye, the titular “woman” from The Woman in Black, whose ebony draped form seems to have become an endlessly reproducing horror meme. (For another contemporary iteration of this figure, see the unimaginatively named The Woman in the Yard). Indeed, so eager is Cognetti to insert this threadbare trope into his story that he’s willing to be anachronistic, wrenching it from its original Victorian context and dropping it into 1940s America, when grieving women no longer worse corsets or shrouded themselves in black lace. 

Helen is the dull product of recycled parts, and while directors can’t entirely fix the problem of a boring monster with visual craft, they can usually inject some tension and terror by way of inventive staging and composition. Unfortunately, in that area, 825 Forest Road plays like an homage to Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House, a series that ran periphery horror–the kind of horror that invites analysis of individual frames–straight into the ground. Fans of Flanagan love replaying scenes in slow motion, searching for “easter eggs”–those hideous ghosts or monsters hidden in dark corners behind blissfully unaware characters. If you want to play this game with 825 Forest Road, you certainly can–Helen’s often standing unobtrusively against walls or in closets–but I think I speak for a lot of filmgoers when I say that this tactic, once fresh and terrifying, has lost its power through repetition. And don’t get me started on the digital glitching that happens whenever Helen is near a recording laptop. Sure, in the 80s and 90s, it was cool when ghosts interfered electro-magnetically with VHS technology. It was also impressive in the early 2000s when the dead made the jump from analog to digital in order to interrupt data streams. But by now, in 2025, the blocking and heavy pixelation are about as surprising as a moving planchette or a flickering candle flame, and it’s time for the spirits to get a new calling card.

The good news is that all of these cliches can’t keep a good movie down–and 825 Forest Road is a good movie. It’s just that its strength lies not where the trailer would have us look–in the ghost of Helen Foster, in the hackneyed effects, etc.–but rather in the film’s human characters and their interpersonal relationships. The situation at 825 Forest Road is a pressure cooker, bubbling with conflicting desires, ugly emotions, and awkward attempts to conceal them. For instance, when Maria finds her treasured mannequin in the backyard and, later, the dishes stacked cairn-like on the countertop crowned with a sarcastic note, she assumes–as anyone would–that Isabel is responsible. While she keeps it classy–her reaction to this apparent aggression from her ungrateful sister-in-law is a jokey comment to her husband delivered through a tight smile–you can practically see her white knuckled grip as she struggles to rein in her growing frustration and anger. Combining a good script with understated acting, Maria’s scenes offer a deliciously tense representation of pure strain, an emotional register that also characterizes many of Isabel’s sequences. It’s low-key excruciating when Chuck asks his sister to help his wife with the unpacking. This kind of “asking” is really “telling” and, though his request is perfectly reasonable–I mean, she lives there rent free–it feels dangerously close to a parent making demands. In this context of persistent microaggressions and psychological stress, the film’s big bad feels superfluous.

Throughout 825 Forest Road, characters fumble toward communication, always feeling more than they say and saying the wrong thing. And this sense of emotional groping is most palpable during discussions of mental health, a subject that Cognetti handles with more realism and sensitivity than I’ve ever seen in a horror film. Gone are the genre’s harmful associations between mental illness and monstrosity, those cheap shortcuts that conflate common mood disorders with psychopathy. In their place, we see Isabel and Maria pursuing appropriate treatment options, taking care of themselves, and generally getting by. Nor is this a didactic message movie bent on correcting our false assumptions about mental illness by way of preachy monologues. When the women address Chuck’s uninformed criticism of therapy or his biases against particular diagnoses, they don’t get up on a soap box to do it. Rather, their brief responses have that unmistakable mark of the real–a mingling of exasperation and affection that rings true to anyone who’s ever had a difficult conversation with a well-meaning but ignorant loved one.  

While kitchen table conversations about suicidal ideation don’t make it into the trailer–a totally sensible decision–in the film, Cognetti makes artistic decisions that clearly prioritize the character’s inner states over the more kinetic external drama. He organizes the film in chapters that, rather than moving the plot along in a linear fashion, focus on how Chuck, Isabel, and Maria see and (mis)interpret the same events. Deemphasizing the incidents themselves, this structure foregrounds the complexity of relationships, the nuances of communication, and the always present potential for misunderstanding. His focus on consciousness and intersubjectivity takes an almost provocative turn when, in a subversion of cinematic conventions, he refuses to visualize things that could easily be shown. In a less thoughtful film, we would have scenes of Isabel talking to a therapist which would be intercut with flashbacks illustrating her narrative. Here, however, we watch her describe her thoughts and feelings to a recording device, a technological standin for the doctor she doesn’t have. Subtracting from the scene the minimal visual interest that an actual human interlocutor would have added, this move forces us to listen more closely to her words. Much of what she says could have been translated into imagery–for instance, a dream about her mother is practically screaming for representation–but instead the film stubbornly sticks with her flat account delivered in an ordinary bedroom. Directorial decisions like this stand out, and I can’t help but read them as a rejection of the sensory overload style of filmmaking that has come to dominate the horror genre. 

Maybe budget concerns and not artistic vision are behind Cognetti’s turn away from the visual–after all, talk (as opposed to practical and computer generated effects) is cheap. And it’s true that the Friends of Gardening meeting, in which locals lay out at great length the dark history of Ashland Falls, is a relatively inexpensive way of delivering a complicated backstory. But as indie horror directors have shown time and time again, necessity is the mother of invention. If financial constraint was a factor here–and I’m just guessing–then Cognetti skillfully leverages it to explore how urban legends are created and perpetuated. We see the process in action as Chuck’s neighbors relate personal anecdotes about Helen and repeat rumors that they’ve heard. The strange power-dynamic at the heart of story-telling is laid bare–new details about Helen are currency and speakers obviously enjoy the attention that comes with telling a juicy tale. Caught up in this atmosphere of terror and excitement, I was disappointed when Helen crashed the party, abruptly ending the spell. 

It turns out that Helen’s far more frightening in legend than in fact. Her appearance and backstory all feel secondary to the drama between Chuck, Isabel, and Maria. But what would I have Cognetti do–remove the ghost from a ghost story? Not at all. I just wish he had continued in the mode of the opening scene. There, Ashley, a teen who has been investigating Helen, is alone at home and on a Zoom call with a friend when she hears a violent hammering on her bedroom door. Stunned into silence, she opens it midway through a barrage of knocks and the hallway is . . . empty. This isn’t a prelude to a jumpscare–we aren’t waiting for the teen to relax so that the abrupt appearance of a ghost can send us all into cardiac arrest. No, the absence continues to be an absence, the tension is never relieved, and the dread lingers. This is Helen at her most powerful.