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 The Forgotten Review
by Ray Garton
2004 -
Directed by: Joseph Ruben
Written by: Gerald Di Pego
Starring:
Julianne Moore - Telly Paretta
Anthony Edwards - Jim Paretta
Dominic West - Ash Corell
Gary Sinise - Dr. Jack Munce
I went out of my way to avoid reading or listening to any reviews of this movie before seeing it. The trailers gave away enough, as it was. I wish I could have seen The Forgotten before I knew anything about it at all. This is a wonderful movie to see completely cold. Of course, I don’t want to ruin the experience for you, so I will only reveal those things already seen in the trailer, which has played frequently on TV.
Telly Paretta is a Brooklyn editor, and a wife and mother who is mourning the death of her son Sam. Fourteen months ago, she and her husband had sent him off to camp on a plane with a number of other children, and the plane had crashed. Julianne Moore’s performance as Telly is heartbreaking as the mother desperately clings to every memory she has of her son, as if keeping some kind of watch. She has a shrine to him in his bedroom, where she pores over photo albums filled with pictures of Sam.
But one day, she notices that Sam is missing from a framed photograph of the three of them, leaving only Telly and her husband Jim in the picture. She checks her photo albums and finds that they are empty, the photos gone. Her videos of Sam are now blank, showing only snow on the screen.
At first, Telly accuses her husband of sabotaging her memories of Sam, but he assures her that he’s done nothing. Jim, and later, Telly’s therapist, Dr. Munce, explain to her as gently as they can that the photo albums have always been empty, the videotapes were always blank. Telly never had a son, they tell her – she invented Sam after experiencing a miscarriage, and she manufactured all the memories she has of him. Telly refuses to believe this.
She meets up with Ash, a man she knows from the park where she used to take Sam. Ash has a daughter named Lauren whom he brought to the park, too. Lauren had gone down on the same plane as Sam. But Ash says he doesn’t have a daughter, that he never had a daughter. Telly tries to get through his drunken haze – he drinks heavily now, as if trying to bury something, or perhaps remember something – and manages to remind him of his daughter. It all comes back to him, and he wants to know where his little girl is.
But how could the lives of these two children be so completely erased? Who could do such a thing? What really happened to the children on that plane? And what does the NSA want with Telly and Ash, all of a sudden?
Director Joseph Ruben (The Stepfather, Sleeping With the Enemy) tips his hand a little too early when Telly casually suggests a possible explanation, but I won’t exacerbate it by revealing it here. The suggestion comes too soon, and a little awkwardly.
But the rest of the time, Ruben and the script by Gerard DiPego make good use of mere suggestion. The perpetrators of this terrible erasure of memory and life are only suggested, and in a way that makes them far more ominous and haunting than if they were brought out into the open.
If you don’t like movies that leave questions unanswered, then you might want to skip this one. The Forgotten does not answer all its questions, but somehow, that makes the threat seem even greater, more sinister.
The trained federal agents are rather incompetent, but they keep showing up and chasing Telly and Ash. Some have complained that the federal agents were too incompetent, but somehow, I just didn’t have a problem believing them and their mistakes. Maybe I was so pleased to be seeing a good movie that I was more forgiving than usual, I’m not sure. I certainly was pleased by the movie – I mean, it’s not that often you find a good horror film that has a cast of talented professional actors in it, in the hands of a real, confident director working with a good script. Those aren’t elements typically associated with horror movies, and they come together beautifully here. Horror fans have to make their way through a lot of dreck to find the gems, but I’m saving you the dreck this time and telling you now – this is a gem.
I might have given The Forgotten four whole bloodshot eyeballs, but the ending was just a little too pat for me. It did not mesh with the overall tone of the movie throughout, but it wasn’t so bad that it ruined the movie for me.
The Forgotten is very entertaining and satisfying in spite of its flaws, which it overcomes with subtlety and quiet, effective chills. It’s also not an easy movie to forget – I’ve been thinking about it a lot since I saw it, pondering its unanswered questions. It’s a haunting film that leaves you with something to chew on.
[Out of a possible four Bloodshot Eyeballs.]
The Forgotten
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