Forgiveness (2021) Review

Three women – one mute, one deaf, one blind – wake up in a sinister medical facility, each having to quickly come to terms with their predicament and work out how they ended up there. With few allies to aid them in their bid for freedom and danger around every corner, what hope do they have of surviving?

Much about Forgiveness possesses an air of the arty and the experimental, whether it’s way in which each of the women is given their own chapter of the tale or the fact that most of its 91 minutes are dialogue free. It’s an experience that relies on its portrayal of a waking nightmare, with all of its incoherence and absurdities, to generate its chills. And I was rather looking forward to having my mind scrambled and my stomach turned.

It’s extremely unfortunate to have to tell you that I found this curiously and thoroughly unengaging, raising unintentional laughs when my skin should have been crawling and causing me to wonder just how much of the running time could be taken up with characters wandering around corridors and spotting potentially malevolent employees in doorways.

There’s an early hint that the story might head down the torture porn route as our first protagonist is duct taped to a bed and menaced by the prospect of receiving an unwanted medical procedure, graphically displayed in a textbook. However, like so much of the film, it’s all promise and no delivery, constantly hinting at a whole catalogue of unspeakably nasty stuff that, in almost every single circumstance, doesn’t happen.

Alex Kahuam’s film plays like a particularly weird and woozy variation on a women in prison flick and it does succeed in terms of being vaguely unpleasant but at the same time the cruelty of the situation is soft pedalled, which on the one hand stops it from being a genuine endurance test but on the other hand points up the failings of its cast of frankly ludicrous bad guys who can’t walk that Lynchian line of being both darkly comedic and absolutely terrifying.

Performing a little impromptu dance before committing a horrendous act of violence left me rolling my eyes at the number of times I’d seen something similar, not to mention that each one of those was rendered in much more impressive style than it is here. The casual violence, when it finally does come, is delivered in such a telegraphed and perfunctory way that there’s no icy ball in the pit of the stomach to accompany it. That’s if you see it at all, as many of the deaths occur off screen and even the potential effectiveness of those is blunted by the grimy, doleful trudge through the sludgy plot to get there.

The resets should be revelatory and the dreamy structure should support its lurches in logic but those opportunities for dazzling the viewer are never taken. It’s a frustrating, plodding hour and a half in which the reluctance to provide any kind of explanation drains the story of any suspense and any weirdness seems grafted on for shock value. The inevitability of the situation means any escape attempts always feel doomed to failure, leaving the viewer waiting only for the next run-in and recapture.

By the time the proceedings reach a sequence in which one of our heroes is dragged into a gathering of suspicious individuals, the effect is that the movie is delving deep into its grab bag of odd plot devices and is staring at the only item remaining, which happens to be the kitchen sink. Even here, Forgiveness is reluctant to truly lean into its strangeness and the situation is more or less thrown away because, you know, nightmares and all that.

The final few moments are predictably, thumpingly bleak but even then, as the tale has rolled back around to where the prologue ushered us in, there is a still a chance to salvage something and leave some kind of impression. However, the resolution of the plot – if you can call it that – chooses that point to deploy the only spoken lines in the piece just to explain the story’s point in overly broad strokes just in case you hadn’t already got it.

This decision is absolutely baffling, completely at odds with the fuzzy logic of the previous eighty minutes and so lacking in any kind of smarts that the effect isn’t the anger felt from seeing the cold, harsh reality of a world controlled by tyrannical men, it’s the annoying realisation that you’ve burned an hour and a half watching it all happen.

If Forgiveness had followed the truly nihilistic path it appeared to be heading down in those early scenes, the result could have been something unforgettable. As it is, it’s far too mannered and concerned about getting its hands properly dirty which means in all likelihood it will neither thrill nor upset anyone. And that’s unforgiveable.

Movie Rating:

Trailer: