After losing her only child in a tragic plane crash, a woman finds no meaning left in life. The memory of her son dominates every aspect of her existence, and she simply cannot bring herself to accept the fact that he’s gone. A terrible situation, however things begin to get even worse. Pictures of her son seem to have been edited so as to remove him entirely, people who met the child claim not to remember him. Finally, things reach their breaking point when the woman's husband finally attempts to convince her that they never had a child to begin with.

Welcome to the setup of ‘The Forgotten’, a setup evoking such themes as the agonizing loss of a child, and the tenuous nature of sanity. Neither of which will be explored in the following movie. It’s as if this film prepared the emotional equivalent of a filet mignon, then let it spoil on the counter as it filled itself up on the figurative Little Debbie® Snack Cakes of cheap Sci-fi pulpery. (Now how’s that for a metaphor?)

Spoiler Warning!

Now what’s the laziest hack explanation someone could doodle up for a string of memory erasures and child disappearances? That’s right, it’s big ol’ guv’mint conspiracy! And what’s a guv’mint conspiracy without aliens! Aliens!, woo! Scary! And so by patterning itself on an overlong last-season episode of the ‘X-files’, Forgotten pisses away any opportunity it had of being meaningful, and simply becomes another Art Bell listener’s wet dream.

This allows for a happy resolution, where all the children were alive all along, and all the moms and dads get their happy tots back! Because what’s the point of a movie centered on grief and loss if it doesn’t tell us that it’s all temporary, and that absolutely everything will turn out happy in the end?

For anyone who’s ever lost someone that they cared about (which, I suppose is all of us) the only thing more terrifying than the loss itself is the prospect of losing the only part we have left of our loved ones, our memories of them. Damn this film. Damn this film for bringing up a topic so profound, and then completely tip-toeing around it.