By Jae-Ha Kim
Substack
January 20, 2024
☆☆☆ (out of ☆☆☆☆)
Jin-seok (played by Kang Ha-neul)
Yoo-seok (played by Kim Mu-yeol)
↑Note: Korean names denote the surname followed by the given name.
Kang Ha-neul stars in “Forgotten,” a film that tackles murder, memory loss, and mayhem in a clever way with twisty turns that keep viewers intrigued. It centers on two brothers, neither of whom are as they seem, and a tragedy that ties them together. Written and deftly directed by Jang Hang-jun, it’s an enjoyable movie with a what happened now?!! ending that offers closure for both the characters and the audience.
Brothers Jin-seok (Kang Ha-neul) and Yoo-seok (Kim Mu-yeol) move into a new home and are told by their parents that there was one condition upon the purchase of the house. The previous owner left behind some of his belongings and no one is to enter that one locked room. Never mind that no homeowner would agree to that weird (and controlling) caveat, since there could be anything in that room. Dead body or stolen goods, anyone? (Spoiler: there aren’t.)
One rainy evening, the brothers take a walk. And when Yoo-seok returns home briefly by himself, Jin-seok watches horrified as his brother is pulled into a van. If it was a kidnapping, it was a weird one. The family receives no ransom demands or communication of any kind. And then almost three weeks later, Yoo-seok returns home with no memory of why he was snatched or what had happened to him.
His parents and the police aren’t overly concerned about Yoo-seok’s abduction, but Jin-seok notices that the brother who was snatched isn’t the same brother who returned back home. They look the same, but have different personalities and behave differently. Even Yoo-seok’s limp moves between legs or disappears completely. How is any of this possible? Already on prescription medication to deal with his anxiety, Jin-seok is coddled, but not believed by anyone.
Director Jang packs a lot into this 109-minute movie, which reveals its answers at a languid pace. By the time the ending rolls around, viewers may think back on the clues sprinkled throughout the film that offered hints and a bit of clarity.
I’ll talk more about that in the Spoiler Alert below.
Release Date: The 109-minute film was released on November 29, 2017 in South Korea. (I watched this on Netflix.)
Spoiler Alert: We are led to believe that the film is set in 1997. But the first clue that things aren’t as they seem is when Jin-seok tells the police that he’s 21. The officer looks at him in disbelief. We learn later that he’s not 21, and it’s not 1997. It is actually 2017, and Jin-seok is a middle-aged man of 41 who looks his age.
In 1997, Korea — like many other East Asian countries — was suffering from the fallout of the Asian Financial Crisis (ca. 1997-1998). When Yoo-seok needed surgery, his family didn’t have the money to pay for it. Desperate to earn enough money to pay the hospital bills, but unable to find work, Jin-seok places an ad online offering to do whatever tasks someone might need.
Finally, someone named Bluebeard¹ contacts him with a lucrative offer: kill Bluebeard’s wife, so that the man can cash out her life insurance policy. But the man makes it clear that Jin-seok should only kill the wife and not this two children.
Jin-seok accepts the offer to be a hitman, but when he arrives at the house, he can’t go through with it. Just as he’s leaving, the wife wakes up and screams, which wakes up her daughter, who comes rushing in. Chaos ensues, and while trying to escape, he unintentionally kills both the woman and the girl with the knife he brought. Then he sees a confused, little boy, who he doesn’t kill. But Jin-seok notices in a family photo that Bluebeard is Yoo-seok’s doctor.
After experiencing this trauma, Jin-seok lost his memory, perhaps as a mechanism to protect himself from remembering that he is a murderer. Wanting to close the case and give closure to the little boy who survived (and is now a young man), the police hire a psychiatrist to play the part of Jin-seok’s father, to try to help him remember what happened that day in 1997. An actress portrays his mother. And Seung-uk takes on the role of his brother, Yoo-seok². And they move the “family” into Bluebeard’s house, hoping that living in the scene of the crime will jog Jin-seok’s memory.
That one room that he hadn’t been allowed to enter in the house? It had been staged to look like the murder scene from 1997.
By this point, you may have guessed who the young man pretending to be Yoo-seok is. He’s Bluebeard’s son. He asks if his father hired Jin-seok to kill his family. Jin-seok tries to spare him the truth. He lies and tells him no. But Seung-uk doesn’t believe him and dies by suicide. Unable to live with the knowledge of what he had done, Jin-seok kills himself, too.
There is no happy ending. Just a happy memory from 1997, before Jin-seok’s parents died in a car accident, which also disabled his older brother Yoo-seok. A little boy offers Jin-seok a lick of his lollipop. As the child runs back to his parents and sister, we see that the boy is Seung-uk and the dad is Bluebeard (aka the doctor). Jin-seok smiles as he watches them walk away, unaware that he will be ruining his life and theirs in the near future.
[¹] Scriptwriter Jang made a deliberate choice to name the doctor Bluebeard. The 19th century French folktale of the same name (written by authors like Charles Perrault and The Brothers Grimm) tells the macabre tale of a wealthy man who kills his wives, hides their bodies in a locked room, and orders his new wife to never open that door. But unlike the young bride, who was rescued by her brothers, Jin-seok had no such relief, because he is the one who killed two people.
[²] I honestly don’t remember what happened to the real Yoo-seok. Maybe he died from his complicated medical issues? If any of you remember, please let me know in the comments section!)
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