Monday, October 29, 2012

Forget Me Not Movie Review


Runtime: 103 minutes
Rating: R
Release Date: October 22, 2009
Director: Tyler Oliver

Forget Me Not opens with a little girl running home from a cemetery in tears, only to reach her parents with no memory of what happened. The film then jumps to the present day as a group of teenagers prepare to celebrate their recent graduation. Sandy (Carly Schroeder, Mean Creek) and her little brother Eli (Cody Linley, Cheaper by the Dozen) recently scored full scholarships to Stanford while their friends all have plans of their own.

Their friend TJ (Sean Wing) invites the group over for a party at his house. Later, they head to the cemetery seen at the beginning of the film and start playing a game they did as kids. A young woman comes out of nowhere and asks if she can play. After heading deeper into the cemetery, Sandy sees the young woman standing on the edge of the cliff. When the girl realizes that she doesn’t remember her, she says that she will soon and jumps over the edge. The police investigate but find no sign of the girl.

While it takes awhile for the film to reach this part, it quickly becomes a little more interesting. Sandy’s friends slowly begin disappearing, dying in new and unusual ways. One girl gets dumped by her boyfriend who slept with another woman the night before. After tossing his class ring in the lake, he leaves her there and she begins swimming across the lake, only to find the body of the same girl from the night before floating. It’s the last thing she sees before drowning. Another man disappears after the same girl crawls into the backseat of his car and forces him off the road.

The creepiest parts of the movie come when the audience learns that only Sandy remembers those friends. The others have no memories of the people who died. She realizes this when she sees her friend Layla having sex with another man and no one thinks she is cheating because she doesn’t have a boyfriend.

It also leads to a scene where the group finds themselves at TJ’s house, which is now abandoned and deserted. This is a great scene because as Sandy wanders through the empty and destroyed house, she flashes back to the moments they shared the night before. She can clearly see the past and the present, but she has no idea why. Even though the people around her make it clear that the present is how they remember things, she knows that something weird is going on.

I actually really liked Forget Me Not up until the end of the film, mainly because it was a little confusing. There are two possible endings to the film. One is that everything occurred because of something they did as children, and the ending becomes a little more cut and dry. The other ending is more of a psychological ending where everything that happened only occurred in her mind. No matter which ending the director intended, this is one that I could watch again.

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