825 Forest Road had its world première at the Overlook Film Festival 2025
“I love when a painting has something hidden in it,” says teenaged Isabelle Wilson (Kathryn Miller) over halfway through Stephen Cognetti’s 825 Forest Road, “something you might never notice unless you stare at it for hours.”
Isabelle is herself a budding artist, and makes the comment at the only gallery in Ashland Falls, Pennsylvania, where her sister-in-law Maria (Elizabeth Vermilyea) has brought her in an attempt to bond. Three months ago Isabelle’s mother was killed in a car accident, so now she is living under the care of her estranged older brother Chuck (Joe Falcone), and Maria and Chuck have moved from their rental in New York City to this small town where even they recognise that their new home’s buying price, though agreeably affordable, is also suspiciously low. Isabelle, who was present at her mother’s death, is filled with grief and guilt, Maria is bipolar and prone to episodes, while Chuck, in the midst of all this negative emotion and bad energy, prefers to look the other way and pretend that there is nothing going on here – much as, years earlier, he simply ran away from the problems in his mother’s house rather than face them.
All of which makes the dysfunctional Wilson family fit right into their new community. For it is a place where people look away, deny and cover up – and try to get on with their lives amid a phenomenon that is unspoken, indeed unspeakable. Moments after Isabelle has made her comment to Maria, the shadowy silhouette of a woman has appeared in the otherwise innocuous framed sketch that the sisters-in-law had been looking at, and the response of the gallery owner is promptly to kick everyone out of the premises and to throw a sheet over the artwork. For this town comes with something that few wish openly to acknowlegde: an unusually high suicide rate and a history of hauntings going back over half a century and converging on a woman named Helen Foster (Diomira Keane) who is engaged in an enduring supernatural vendetta.
Back in the late 1940s, after the townsfolk repeatedly ignored a bullying campaign that led to the suicide of Helen’s daughter Mary, the distraught, desperate single mother, having exhausted every avenue of appeal to no avail, took matters into her own hands, murdering the family responsible before killing herself. Yet even today, in post-millennial Ashland Falls, Helen continues to be a baleful presence, visiting dreams, taking possession of objects and people, and even manifesting as a terrifying, murderous spectre whose face is the last thing her victims see. She is the embodiment of the town’s shame, fear and denial – and is indeed herself denied and kept hidden, with the town entirely re-zoned to conceal her original address and shrouded in a furtive silence about her periodic (re)appearances. Everyone knows her myth, and most have glimpsed her themselves or at least know somebody who has – but there is a semi-official omertà surrounding her. Those that do talk about her must meet in huddled clandestine groups, like AA meetings – or, significantly, like counselling sessions for victims and survivors.
As Helen starts messing with the already fragile and vulnerable Wilsons, Chuck sets out, as many others have before him, to locate the house where Helen is said to have lived, even though it is a place that no longer appears on any map. Accordingly 825 Forest Road is a haunted house movie where, unusually, the key titular address is all at once highly specific and buried in mystery, with its location kept off the public record. Told in four formally headed chapters, the first three representing the different perspectives of Chuck, Isabelle and Maria, and the fourth taking us where the film has been promising from the outset (indeed, from the title) to go, this is a portrait of a family suffocating under its own unspoken secrets. For here, the ghostly vehicle and tenor of the film’s central allegory become horrifically intertwined, merging the dysfunctional trauma of the Wilsons and the Fosters into one.
Yet 825 Forest Road, despite the particuliarity of its title, is also a splendid piece of misdirection. For even as Chuck looks beyond the town’s official, redrawn borders, and indeed eventually finds a terrifying house there, Helen will always strike closer to home, as a ubiquitous avatar of the ignored, the marginalised and the neglected. Helen truly is the return of the repressed, her grudge cursing a community to keep wilfully overlooking, as it did three quarters of a century earlier, the horror right in its midst, and to keep reenacting the bad conscience of its own inaction. Those that move to Ashland Falls tend to belong there – but which of us does not?
Meanwhile writer/director Cognetti, whose Hell House LLC (2015) and its sequels proved his way with turning clown statuettes into objects of heightened tension and terror, here makes a truly creepy looking mannequin (named Martha) a medium of Helen’s latest return, while triangulating on a haunting which gets ever more insidious with each chapter’s shift in point of view. Yet beneath all the frights is a portrait of a wider American community – albeit one with abiding small-town values – that prefers ignoring and concealing past abuses (domestic, municipal, national) over confronting them, and so must live – and die – with its historical traumas unaddressed and therefore every-present. After all, Helen’s abiding rage, for all its scattergun targeting, is hardly unjustified, and she was never the one who merited excommunication and erasure for the sins of others. Like the wronged mother in Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-on: The Grudge (2002), Helen is implacable, and 825 Forest Road will lead, inexorably, to a doom foretold – and hidden in a picture.
strap: Stephen Cognetti’s quadripartite ghost story finds recurring trauma, abuse and shame in a small-town’s ever-overlooked haunting
© Anton Bitel
