Review of The Forgiven (2022) by Kenr — 22 Feb 2023

The Forgiven – Or Are They? It’s difficult to know what writer/director (John Michael McDonough) was trying to convey with this production. It’s about a group of highly unlikeable (in fact totally despicable) privileged whites, gathering together for a grossly decadent ‘party’ in a most unlikely place.

..an isolated semi-palace in the middle of the Moroccan desert. With scant knowledge about the hosts or their guests, we are simply expected to put up with their all too obviously unsubtle vulgar language and generally vile behavior, as they settle into a weekend of grotty debauchery.

Drugs, booze, and sex are all part of the sleaze on offer while being attended to by local Moroccan servants -- all who seem to view their employers and guests as worthless rubbish-- which the filmmakers go out of their way to demonstrate.

The activities of these privileged whites are served up as gross sensationalism that’s bent toward manipulating our view of them as worthless - while all the Muslim servants are presented as angelic – that alone is conjuring up a theme of deliberate racial hatred for little reason other than the sake of it.

Is this the sole point of this movie; is there nothing of any other purpose here? At one point a local teenager is killed in a somewhat careless accident, this produces the film’s best segment. The father of the boy (played with intensity by Ismael Kanater) requests the perpetrator to go with him while he buries his son, causing much anxiety, but the outcome of this can only be viewed as somewhat peculiar in the extreme.

This could have been a modern classic with a more rounded and balanced script. The visual quality is evident and the cast clearly hand-picked, there’s an effective atmospheric music score courtesy of Lorne Balfe but how much of Lawrence Osborne’s novel remains within the screenplay? (seems to have serious omissions) If the object of this project was to generate hatred for whites, it’s done its dirty job but will this help any of the world's social relationships heal? I doubt it very much.

Best Quote: from a Moroccan servant after witnessing a blatant act of adultery by a female guest; "A woman with no discretion is like a gold ring through a pigs snout” (no, not Moroccan wisdom, as this pic would have you believe but Proverbs 11:22.