Forgotten

Jin-seok (Kang Ha-neul, New Trial) moves into a new house with his family, consisting of Dad, Mom and his brilliant but disabled brother Yu-seok. He gets an uneasy sense of déjà vu, especially regarding a sealed chamber facing his bedroom, but dismisses it. Everything goes fine, until Yu-seok is kidnapped by a group of thugs on a rainy night. Returning 19 days later, the elder brother does not seem to remember anything that happened to him. Jin-seok, however, begins to notice some alarming things: Yu-seok sneaks out of the house at night, meeting suspicious characters and talking like a gangster boss; he seems to forget which leg of his is disabled; and so on. Jin-seok becomes convinced that someone else is impersonating his brother. However, the truth he uncovers is far stranger and more devastating.

Forgotten was a moderate hit at the box office, collecting 1.83 million tickets during the winter season of 2017, partly attributable to its two young leads, Kang and Kim, who have developed a substantive fan base among musical and TV drama enthusiasts. The original screenplay by director Jang Hang-jun (Break Out) is a curious contraption, one that feels like a compressed entire season of an early 2000s TV drama spiced with gore and F-words. Unlike the more loosely constructed and conceptually weird Korean thrillers that are adapted from web comic series, Forgotten, while just as far-fetched, at least manages to hold viewer interest with its elaborate Rubik’s Cube narrative tricks. Those who are less beholden to Korean TV drama-like stylistics, with the requisite deployment of slow motion footage, rapid cuts and long-form expository narration, might prefer the former.

One concern for me are the film’s references to Oldboy, and the ways in which Jang chooses to process them in its second half. Like some scholars who insist on reading Oldboy as a parable about a Korean everyman’s (losing) struggle against the evils of neoliberal capitalism, Jang sets out to retell the traumatic story of the so-called IMF financial crisis of 1997 under the guise of a mystery thriller. That in itself might or might not be a decent idea, but it soon becomes clear that, in order to make this point, Jang ties each plot element or characterization, including Yu-seok’s real identity and the truth behind Jin-seok’s suppressed memory, to a moment taken from Oldboy, and a “tragic” denouement wherein nobody actually confronts his or her moral responsibility.

The cast valiantly works through the complex narrative and tangled character motivations. Kang Ha-neul is clearly a trouper, considering the grungy make-up he had to wear in the second half. Kim Mu-yeol fares better, but it’s true that upon further reflection his characterization makes little sense. Among the technical staff, DP Kim Il-yeon and Lighting Supervisor Kim Min-jae (both of whom worked together previously in The Mimic and A Single Rider) employ a thick, shadowy palette with stabs of glaring light illuminating select areas of the screen. This enhances the bleak atmosphere of the house, while also endowing the proceedings with a measure of visual flair at the same time.

Jang Hang-jun

Jang Hang-jun’s earliest film credit is as the screenwriter of the 1996 comedy The Adventures of Mrs. Park. He made his directorial debut with the 2002 comedy Break Out (a.k.a. Spark the Lighter), and followed that up quickly with a second comedy Spring Breeze (2003). Close to a decade and a half would pass before his third directorial feature Forgotten, but in that time Jang was far from idle. He directed and/or wrote the screenplay for numerous TV movies and dramas, did cameos and supporting actor roles in over 20 films and TV dramas including Hellcats (2007), Love On-Air (2011), Venus Talk (2013), and My Sassy Girl 2 (2016), and established himself as a well-known TV personality and host on variety and entertainment shows. 

FILMOGRAPHY

2002 – Break Out
2003 – Spring Breeze
2017 – Forgotten