The Forgotten English Movie
The first 30 minutes of Gerald DePego's screenplay are so gripping, you step into director Joseph Ruben's puzzle unaware of the puddles ahead.
But we're jumping the gun. To take away from the marvellous achievements and skilled suspenseful progress of the film's initial narration is to take excellence into damnation.
Julianne Moore, who was last year in glorious form in "The Hours", returns with a relatively trifle piece of work that works...but not all the way.
The initial passage of the plot takes us into Telly's (Moore) bereavement. The loss of her son and attempts to grapple with the tragedy leads her into a kind of vacant terror that we saw Jessica Lange suffering in "Men Don't Leave".
In that film Lange's little son wanted to see his dead father "just once". He couldn't. But Telly does get back her lost son. She also gets back the life that is erased from her brain cells by some spooky powers that try to rule and over-rule her better judgement. Ditto the screenwriter.
But oops, I am not really supposed to tell you the denouement. Problem is, the finale is a piece of disappointment wrapped up in the finest fabrics available to mannequin-kind.
Done in stilted movements derived from the horror-thriller genre, the sudden eruption of the supernatural diminishes the sense of foreboding that builds up earlier in the narrative as rudely as the much-vilified finale of Manoj Shyamalan's "The Village".
You wish the substance to the film's early promise had been sustained. This is not to take away from the strong sense of suspense that director Joseph Ruben unlocks in smooth motions of soft-footed suspense.
Ruben has earlier got a riveting performance out of Julia Roberts playing a brutalised and hounded woman in "Sleeping With The Enemy". In "The Forgotten", Julianne Moore seems to move through pre-conceived motions. Her performance is calculated for sympathy and suspense.
The supporting performances never get seriously collaborative. They are designed to take the plot forward without making us aggressively curious about the outcome.
The relatively unknown Dominic West plays an alcoholic father who has "forgotten" his daughter's death. The sequences where Moore nudges his memory awake are well written.
We cannot fault "The Forgotten" for its belief in the bristling convictions associated with the supernatural genre. But somehow the first interlude of the diligently crafted plot suggests a more natural than supernatural treatment of the age-old theme of death and mortality.
Sadly, "The Forgotten" is fated to live up to its title. It's forgotten sooner rather than later.
