As a horror-thriller fanatic, Halloween is my favorite time of year — my excuse to binge-watch and read all the horror movies, short films and webtoons to my heart’s content. So, naturally, when Instagram recommended “Forgotten” to me, I immediately added it to my watchlist and watched it in the middle of the night the very next day.
For a general synopsis, “Forgotten” is a Korean thriller released in 2017 following the 21-year-old protagonist, Jin-seok. When he moves into a new home, which triggers a sense of déjà vu, with his mother, father and older brother Yoo-seok — whom he greatly admires — strange sounds and hallucinations begin to disturb his sleep, even when he takes his medications. His brother is abducted one night, returning 19 days later with no recollection of what happened, and Jin-seok can’t help but investigate his odd behavior.
If you thought this movie would follow the tried-and-true haunted house, split personality, doppelgänger or family with a secret trope, you’d be absolutely wrong. The intro certainly sets you up with those expectations, but you find yourself unable to tear your eyes away from the screen, with every passing scene making you second-guess yourself. It’s hard, after all, to predict the end with such an unreliable narrator… or is he?
*** MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD ***
As Yoo-seok leaves in the middle of the night every single night, Jin-seok becomes increasingly suspicious about his behavior. He follows him into an alley, where he discovers that the officers “investigating” Yoo-seok’s disappearance had actually been working with him all along. Jin-seok is knocked out and awakes the next day in his bed, his brother acting as if nothing had happened at all; he’d just been off his meds too long, the very same reason he’d been hearing strange noises from the upstairs bedroom.
So… gang activity? Drug ring? Not quite.
Jin-seok immediately confides in his mother, but soon after overhears her warning Yoo-seok that he’s uncovered their plan. When Jin-seok steps outside to make a silent escape, he comes face-to-face with his father, who tells him to step inside.
The police laugh him out of the department when he tells them the story. This 41-year-old is clearly delusional. That’s right, Jin-seok is a middle-aged man who has spent this entire time thinking he’s still 21 in 1997, stuck in the most traumatic time of his life 20 years later.
In that year, Yoo-seok reveals, Jin-seok murdered a mother and her teenage daughter in their home with no remorse, leaving their bloodied corpses and a knife on the floor and ’90s music playing in the background. Frustrated with how quickly the police and the public forgot the case with each passing year, vigilantes took matters into their own hands, tracking the now 41-year-old down, abducting him and torturing him into a confession. He remembered nothing. To bring him back to the night of the crime, they brainwashed him into believing he was 21 again, living with his family and moving into a new house… the very same one in which he committed the murders.
Around this time, I began thinking they must have posed as his family members to punish him for some wrongdoing he clearly doesn’t remember, like the episode “White Bear” in “Black Mirror,” (which, if you haven’t already watched, you definitely should). Warmer, but still not quite there.
Yoo-seok (or whoever’s posing as him) chases Jin-seok down in a car chase, which he narrowly escapes… only to get hit by a passerby. The crash reveals at last what happened: 1997 was the happiest and most harrowing year of Jin-seok’s life. As a starry-eyed student preparing for his college entrance exams, he lived with his mother, father and older brother — all of whom were suddenly torn away from him in a car accident, both parents dying instantly and his brother clinging to life in a coma.
Because the country was in economic crisis, he could neither afford his brother’s life-saving surgery nor find any employment. One day, he received a message from an unknown user offering him money with one condition: that he break into a home with a mother and her two children and murder the mother.
The sight of the mother sleeping with her toddler son snapped him out of it. He realized then, perhaps, that he would be taking from them what the world had already taken from him. Yet the mother and her teenage daughter saw him before he could leave, prompting him to silence their screams with a fatal stab and knocking over the music player in the process.
At last, as he walked toward the door, the boy asked him what happened to his mother and sister. Jin-seok lied, telling the boy to hide under the covers and count to one hundred ten times, after which his family would return to him. On his way out, he noticed the family portrait hanging on the wall: the man who had ordered the hit was his brother’s doctor, a man so desperate to support his children financially (despite his job that should pay well) that he went to such extreme lengths to secure an insurance payout from his wife’s death. The doctor dies in the confrontation that follows, falling to his death and taking his secret to the grave.
Jin-seok regains consciousness in the hospital, with “Yoo-seok” by his side, a syringe in hand. It is in fact the very same boy he lied to two decades ago, now a bitter, anguished man. Instead of getting the closure he has so desperately searched for all these years, though, Jin-seok lies to him again, taking the blame entirely for himself in his remorse, even when the truth is clear. As Jin-seok apologizes and injects himself with the poison, the man takes his own life by jumping out of the hospital window.
Their stories now rest with them, forgotten.