The Forgotten introduces us to a perplexing scenario. Just over a year before, Telly Paretta’s son Sam died in an airplane crash. It’s been hard for her to let go of his death, but now things are getting strange. All evidence of his existence have suddenly been erased and no one who know him remembers him. Is she going crazy? Or has she been crazy all along and is just now going sane? Is this some vast conspiracy? Who would be doing this and why? It’s all fairly interesting until we figure it out and lose almost all interest.

The Forgotten is roughly three acts. In the first, Telly (Julianne Moore) struggles with the idea that she has been inventing the idea of Sam in her mind. In the second she runs from the feds and the third is weirdness. The film is saturated with plot holes ranging from major to minor. Like, in the second act, why doesn’t she just stop running from the agents and just ask what they want. She never knows, yet feels the need to run. It seems as if the place she finally runs to is the place they would have taken her anyways. Oh, if I felt like there was any good in it, I could go on for some time as to all my questions as to why this and why that, but it’s not worth it.

I do enjoy the notion of the questioning of identity and memory. Any sci-fi film with that kind of thread is going to pull me in, but The Forgotten doesn’t really have anything to say on the matter. In fact, The Forgotten really doesn’t have much of anything to say about anything. It is nothing more than another tragically self-inflicted title, a film that is indeed destined to be forgotten.

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