The actress Julianne Moore has one face as transparent as water, the other as opaque as a mystery. With her milky complexion and lapidary features, Moore can seem alarmingly fragile, as breakable and translucent as fine French porcelain. It's a face that suggests vulnerability, femininity and an almost otherworldly ethereality.
But there is a tough side to the actress, too, a core resolve that can harden her beauty into a mask, and it is in the space between her perceived delicacy and this mask that Moore does her best work. For filmmakers who know how to put her faces into play, the actress can work wonders, as she did for the director Todd Haynes in Safe and his wrenching melodrama Far From Heaven.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF BVI
In the preposterous thriller The Forgotten, however, a pseudospiritual, mumbo-jumbo, science-fiction inflected mess that opens in Taiwan today, the director Joseph Ruben does not just fail to tap into Moore's talent; he barely gets her attention. As Telly, a Brooklyn mother in mourning, Moore delivers a performance that has all the emotional commitment of a bored kid playing with a light switch. Even after Telly discovers that all the images of her dead son, Sam (Christopher Kovaleski), have been erased from the photographs scattered around her home, Moore keeps flipping the switch: sad, not sad, sad, not sad.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF BVI
Initially, the disappearing images are explained away by Telly's creepy psychiatrist, Dr. Munce (Gary Sinise). As her husband (Anthony Edwards) nervously sits by, Telly learns that Sam never existed and that, after suffering a miscarriage, she invented the boy out of thin air. Telly finds this hard to believe (she isn't the only one) and embarks on a Search for the Truth.
The search leads her to a hard-drinking ex-hockey player, Ash (Dominic West), whose watery eyes obscure a sensitive soul and potential romantic interest. Burdened with his own tragedy, Ash joins Telly in her increasingly mysterioso quest, one that takes them from under the Brooklyn Bridge to the wilds of Long Island and, in due course, involves the National Security Agency, a police detective (Alfre Woodard), an omniscient stranger (Linus Roache) and some tawdry special effects.
In the 1987 pulp-horror movie The Stepfather, Ruben managed to squeeze first-rate chills and atmosphere from what might have been just another sleazy serial-killer flick. In the years since, he has ranged across genres, doing his best work with cryptohorror thrillers like Sleeping With the Enemy. Here, however, working with a screenplay credited to Gerald Di Pego, Ruben never settles into a coherent groove, partly because the movie simultaneously tries for cheap thrills, emotional uplift and some nonsense about the eternal mother. The other problem is that the film takes too long to let us know what is going on and why. Like a good striptease, a good thriller reveals its secrets a little at a time because without the buildup, the shivers of anticipation, we may not want to stick around.
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