Review by Tristan Bishop
If there’s one thing we Brits excel at, it’s a good ghost story. From MR James (arguably the master of the form) to the 1945 Ealing studios spooky portmanteau tale Dead Of Night, to the blockbusting Woman In Black, we’ve got the restless dead covered. The reasons for this are debatable, of course, but one of them must surely be that we’re an old island, full of ruins, large, isolated houses, run-down graveyards and dark country roads. Our surroundings lend themselves to gothic tales of revenge or unrequited love from beyond the grave; our rich history, when the surface is scratched, is filled with madness, poverty and murder. Adding to this ghastly heritage is The Forgotten, but this is not a film set in a huge gothic building, like 2011’s The Awakening, or even a spooky country church like last years’ brilliant The Borderlands; instead, The Forgotten is set in another Great British institution – an abandoned council estate.
The main character in the film is Tommy (played by Clem Tibber), a young teenager who goes to live with his father Mark (Shaun Dingwall, a familiar face from British television) on said estate. Tommy is surprised to find that his mother is not there – his father tells him (rather unconvincingly) that she is staying with a friend, and it transpires that his father’s ‘work’ seems to be a little outside the law – most of what he does seems to be stripping copper pipes and other materials from the soon-to-demolished estate (presumably for sale on the black market). Not a great life for a young man, especially a sensitive, artistic one like Tommy, who spends his free time sketching his surroundings. When a gang of local thugs ridicule his artwork and attempt to steal his portable CD player (hang on, when is this film set?), Tommy is saved by Carmen (Elarica Gallacher), who literally fights the aggressors off with a big stick. It transpires Carmen works at the local cafe, and, despite being initially guarded and stand-offish, soon becomes friendly with Tommy.
Unfortunately not everything goes quite so well for the young man – he becomes unnerved by freaky noises from elsewhere in the estate, and someone (or something) moves all his belongings around when he is out of the flat. Adding to the unease, Tommy’s father turns out to not be a very nice guy – at one point he brings a prostitute back to the rundown estate, who proceeds to run screaming from the flat over some unseen transgression, which leads us to question what exactly has happened to Tommy’s mother. And when the local pimps rough up the father in retaliation, leaving Tommy to fend for himself, he begins to investigate strange noises in the flat next to theirs, eventually convincing Carmen to help him out; but what they find there might be an unpleasant revelation for both of them.
The grim council estate setting of The Forgotten will be familiar to viewers of British TV drama; in fact, director Oliver Frampton and writer James Hall were both script editors on long-running police-based TV series The Bill in a previous life, and whilst it isn’t the first film to try and bring horror conventions into an urban British milieu (see the mini-wave of ‘hoodie horror’ from a few years ago, including films like Citadel, set in an abandoned Glaswegian tower block), it’s certainly the most effective example, mainly because it has real empathy for the young, main characters. In fact the main problem with the films that precede it is that they tend to play on the middle class paranoia over roving gangs of savage youths who are perceived to populate the council estates of Britain, whereas here the characters are very much the product of their environment (especially Carmen). There’s tenderness and understanding at work that makes the characters likeable and relatable (helped by excellent performances from the leads), even to those who have never faced the hardships that they do. But let’s not forget that this is a ghost story first and foremost – and thankfully this aspect is also handled in a subtle and intelligent manner, with a slow build and pay-off that, for once, works and doesn’t leave the audience bored to tears by the midway mark. As with the best ghost stories, you don’t see much here (aside from one split second shot), but sound is very well utilised, and the set design inside the abandoned flat is thoroughly creepy, suggesting a descent into hell itself. In its latter stages the film even takes some turns which I wasn’t expecting at all, and still manages to end on a satisfying, if rather devastating, note.
So if you’re a fan of the Great British spook story, and don’t mind your chills mixed up with a bit of urban grit, The Forgotten is a must-see – tender and subtle, yet powerful enough to linger in your memory (unlike the title may suggest).