Without giving away too much, The Forgotten is about
what happens when a mother who is grieving over her dead son suddenly discovers
that all evidence of her son’s existence has disappeared—photos, newspaper
reports, home videos, everything. At first, she suspects her husband and
psychiatrist of perpetuating an elaborate hoax to help her overcome her grief.
But when confronted, they tell her she never actually had a son, that her
“memories” of him are a figment of her imagination. Unwilling to accept that
she might be going crazy, she sets out on a wild, adrenaline-driven journey
that eventually leads to an explanation far weirder than she could have ever
imagined.
I would put this film into the same category as the
recent sci-fi thriller Godsend. Take away the modern trappings, and both
films could easily have served as episodes in the original Twilight Zone TV
series. That would be a compliment were it still 1957. Unfortunately, the same
plot devices that worked back then don’t really cut it today. Thus, even though
both The Forgotten and Godsend still offer a lot of entertainment
value, the films ultimately fail due to half-baked story development and
endings that are so conventional you just wish the screenwriters had thought to
give M. Night Shyamalan a call. That said; The Forgotten is definitely
the superior of the two films. Not only are the premise and script more
compelling, the overall look and feel of the film make it abundantly clear that
director Joseph Ruben is ready to move on to bigger and better things.
The Forgotten effectively plays on a number of
fears—fear of losing a child, fear of losing your mind, even fear of the
government. But most of all, it plays on our fear that the ultimate power in
the universe may not be good after all, that “God,” or whoever happens to be in
charge, is merely toying with us in one grand, cosmic experiment. While the
film does not offer any assurance that that isn’t the case, it does offer hope
in the form of a familiar, four-letter word: L-O-V-E. And that is more than I
can say about most episodes of The Twilight Zone.