Tacky Tuesday: The Forgotten Trades Its Mystery for a Monster Movie
The Forgotten (2004, Joseph Ruben) opens fourteen months after Telly Paretta’s son Sam died in a plane crash. She keeps his bedroom exactly as he left it and sits vigil there – until the day his photos vanish from her album, her husband tells her they never had a son, and her therapist explains that Sam was a fantasy she built after a miscarriage. The set-up is a good one: a psychological thriller built on a single question, whether the person telling you your memories are wrong is right. Tacky Tuesday exists for twists that answer a good question badly, and this one is a case study.
The Twist
Telly isn’t delusional. Someone – something – is erasing the children, and the memories of them, as part of an experiment testing whether the bond between a parent and child can be broken. The people erasing them are not human, and the adults around Telly, including her therapist, Dr. Munce, either serve them or know they can do nothing to stop them. Anyone who threatens to expose the experiment is yanked off the ground and into the sky, sometimes through the roof of a building, and the film stages those moments as sudden shocks. Telly’s memory of Sam survives because a mother’s bond turns out to run deeper than the experiment can reach, which breaks it – and the film ends with the children restored and only Telly remembering what happened.
The problem isn’t that the answer is science fiction. It’s what the answer does to the first half. The entire opening act is built to make the audience doubt Telly, and the moment the film reveals that her memory was right all along, the question that drove the story evaporates with nothing to replace it. The explanation is also nearly all assertion: “them” is never characterized, the experiment’s purpose is stated once, and the film has no sense of what the experimenters actually want. Set next to Monday’s pick, which spends its whole runtime laying the groundwork its reveal needs, this is a twist that arrives from outside the story and rewrites it by fiat. The opening is still worth watching for the performances – the film just never lives up to the trust that opening asks the viewer to place in it.