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Review: Forgotten (기억의 밤) (2017)
On Wikipedia this movie as billed as a mystery thriller but it played as a tragedy. At the end I kept wishing the story would get better but it never did. I’m not one to shy away from sad endings especially when they make sense, but in the case of this movie, the tragedy was hard to watch. It was still an ok movie I guess. I would say the first half was a mystery/thriller and the latter half was just tragedy.
Spoilers.
Story
Right from the beginning you could tell something was not right. Jin-seok lived a perfect life. Had a loving family, loving parents, the perfect role model older brother, and they were moving to a nice little house. But right away some things were off. The mover questioned the relationship between Jin-seok and Yu-seok, there were sounds from the room they were never to enter.
One night, the brothers went to the roof for a break in the rain, and as Yu-seok left, he was abducted. Jin-seok was worried sick but his brother returned after 19 days. Things grew eerier afer then. At one point Jin-seok questioned his brother’s limp. One night, Yu-seok snuck out and Jin-seok followed him to a dark alleyway, where he saw two men who had posed as cops (when questioning Jin-seok about the abduction) who called Yu-seok “boss.”
When Jin-seok’s mother came home, he told her about the strange events. She seemed concerned, but behind closed doors, she was calling someone to come home because ‘the punk’ was starting to figure things out. Jin-seok tried to run away, escaping the people he used to call Mother and Father.
He went to the police station and after some questioning it was revealed that he as not a missing person, and that the year was actually 2017, and not 1997 like Jin-seok had thought. He was not a 21 year old student, he was a 41 year old man. So when the movers questioned his relationship with Yu-seok, it was because he looked a lot older than Yu-seok and yet was calling him hyung. I felt like this could have been avoided if the team had just hired internally for movers but as a plot device it was meant to sow the seeds of doubt within Jin-seok.
Jin-seok returned to the house to inquire on what actually happened. The man who posed as Yu-seok explained. There were a mother and daughter who were killed in the exact room Jin-seok was not allowed to enter. It became a cold case but the case was handed to private investigators to look into, and they tracked down the killer as Jin-seok. The problem was that Jin-seok had no memories of the event. Psychologists determined this to be true and that he had dissociative amnesia due to the event being so traumatic. The psychologist suggested hypnotizing Jin-seok to the point right before the crime to see if Jin-seok would regain his memories then. The psychologist posed as Jin-seok’s dad, an actress was hired to be his mom, and Yu-seok’s actor seemed to be in charge of the whole operation. The night that Yu-seok and Jin-seok went to the roof to take a break was the night that they were supposed to introduce Jin-seok to thecrim scene and induce is memories. Yu-seok being abducted was actually him being arrested by the cops for fraud and assault and that threw a wrench into the plan. The team bribed the cops to release “Yu-seok” but they had to wait until the next rainy day for the plan, during which the effects of hypnosis started to wear off.
Jin-seok insisting on his innocence, so as Yu-seok’s actor took him away to ‘deal’ with him, Jin-seok ran away from the van. Yu-seok’s actor chased after him and they both ended up in car accidents.
During surgery, Jin-seok regained his memories. He was travelling to a new home with his family, and on the car ride there, they got into a car crash. His parents perished, and his older brother was in a coma. Due to the financial crisis, he struggled to find work to come up with money to pay for his brother’s surgery. His doctor told him that his brother’s surgery would be time sensitive and implied that Jin-seok would have to come up with the money soon. So Jin-seok took on a dangerous job he found on a chatroom to kill someone. He was sent to the house of the murder, and told to kill only the woman and not the children. Upon seeing the woman, Jin-seok had a change of heart and turned to leave, but the daughter saw him and screamed, which resulted in Jin-seok panicking and killing her. The mother also screamed and panicked when she saw her dead daughter and Jin-seok killed her too. When he turned to leave, he saw the remaining son; Jin-seok told him to hide under his bed and count and that he would bring his mother and sister back, but obviously Jin-seok just left. When he did, he saw that the father of the family was actually his doctor. Jin-seok approached his doctor and his doctor said he needed the money from the insurance company. Jin-seok and the doctor got into a fight and the doctor fell to his death over the building as a result.
The remaining son, Choi Seung-uk, was the man who posed as Yu-seok. He went to Jin-seok in the hospital, ready to lethally inject him. As he did so, Jin-seok apologized, implying that he’d regained his memories. Seung-uk asked Jin-seok if his father was responsible for the murder and Jin-seok denied it, saying it was his own actions. Seung-uk didn’t believe him, because he knew his father had taken out a bunch of life insurance policies on his mother a month before the murder. But after the deaths, his relatives had taken the money and put him in an orphanage.
Seung-uk left Jin-seok. Jin-seok crawled out of bed and lethally injected himself, while Seung-uk jumped out of a window at the hospital. As Jin-seok died, he dreamed about his happiest moment, when he was on the trip with his family to their new home. As he was leaving, he bumped into a child Seung-uk and his family. I think it must have been a dream sequence, Jin-seok’s way of trying to imagine a better ending for them all.
The first half of the movie was thrilling. I had guessed that Jin-seok was being gaslit as the clues were pretty obvious. Jin-seok being overly naïve about s family, odd things being covered up. It reminded me of a few other stories. One was a My Sweet Audrina where a character was basically kept ‘young,’ and also of the episode of Black Mirror where a criminal was constantly brainwashed to relive their crimes as punishment. I felt this story was more of the latter and that Jin-seok was going to be punished eventually.
The second half of the movie, when Jin-seok returns to the house after coming back from the police station, is a tragedy. The story just gets worse and worse. For much of this part I had hoped that Jin-seok was innocent. But when he regained his memories, I had no choice to accept the truth. Whether or not it was his intention, he was a murderer. And it was tragic for both Jin-seok and Seung-uk. For Jin-seok, he was pushed and manipulated to kill to save his brother and he still couldn’t save him in the end. For Seung-uk he lost his whole family and Jin-seok still wouldn’t admit to him the truth, though Seung-uk knew it in his heart. Unfortunately this situation was two families ruined, and honestly, death was the best way to go.
So yes, the movie did end in a pretty depressing manner.
Production
It was alright. The beginning of the movie focused on making Jin-seok’s life as perfect as possible. He lived in a quaint little house that almost felt like a cottage in a fairy tale. In the rest of the first half, it started to feel a bit like a horror, since it still took place in the house that had a lot of hardwood in the structure. The second half felt more like what I would expect from a South Korean revenge series in terms of aesthetics.
The acting was fine. It wasn’t the best I’d seen but I think the story was a little too straightforward to give space for anything else. Which is fine I think.
Characters
Jin-seok
Jin-seok started the movie as an optimistic boy who looked up to everyone in his family. He was living his happiest life. When there were strange things going on, he trusted his family about not letting them worry him. But there started to be cracks in the fantasy and Jin-seok caught on. Why were their weird noises from the locked room and why weren’t any of them allowed to go in? Why did his brother threaten to poke his eye out and why did he change his entire demeanour at night? While Yu-seok tried to convince Jin-seok that it was because he hadn’t taken his medicine and was hallucinating, Jin-seok realized that he hadn’t told Yu-seok about taking a taxi and yet Yu-seok knew. And the piece of lead that had fallen out of the pencil was indeed on the desk. What really cemented the deal was when he overheard his mom on the phone, calling him a punk and such. When Jin-seok went to the police station, I was worried that they’d send him right back into the arms of his captors and write off his entire story, but it did give him crucial information about how he was twenty years older than he was.
After the truth of the crime was revealed, Jin-seok probably felt shocked and that was why he felt he couldn’t have done such a thing. He maintained his innocence. And to be fair I don’t think he was lying, he still had no memory of the crime. It was only in surgery that he started remembering his actions. He felt sorry for them and he did apologize to Seung-uk. He tried to lie to Seung-uk about his father being involved so that he wouldn’t have to know about his father being a bad man, but it did not convince Seung-uk. The circumstances were too perfect. Jin-seok felt ashamed for having ruined the entire family of Seung-uk, so he felt he needed to die anyway, and he lethally injected himself.
I felt that the dream sequence was a dream and that it didn’t happen. I felt it was Jin-seok’s rationalization that he didn’t hate Seung-uk’s family, and in another life he could have become friends.
Seung-uk
Seung-uk was first known to us as Yu-seok, Jin-seok’s older brother. He was the perfect older brother: smart, sporty, handy, kind, popular. Despite that, Jin-seok did not feel jealous of his brother. He looked up to him. Yu-seok had gotten into a car accident and thus had a limp, but he was still the golden child of the family.
Jin-seok and Yu-seok stayed in one room because the other room was supposed to have the things of the previous owner, but we know it was because the team was preparing the crime scene exactly as it was the night of the murder. Being in the same room also enabled Yu-seok to keep an eye on Jin-seok even as he slept.
Yu-seok’s disappearance was very shocking to Jin-seok but he came back in one piece and Jin-seok was so relieved. But Yu-seok was acting kind of weird. At one point, Jin-seok questioned his limp. We would find this out later, but Yu-seok never would have limped, because after the accident he fell into a coma and later died. So this version of Yu-seok never appeared to Jin-seok.
But the strangest thing was when Yu-seok snuck out at night. First, he had nearly poked out Jin-seok’s eye. And after he left the house he became another person: lost his limp, took off his glasses, smoked, and had a group of cronies who called him boss. The cronies, who had appeared to him as police officers, were really weird too, saying Jin-seok had caused issues for their boss.
The next day, Yu-seok tried to pretend nothing had happened and that it was just a bad dream as Jin-seok hadn’t taken his medication the prior day as he had dropped it under the cabinet. But it was because he hadn’t taken the drugs that his memory was clearer (they were intended to put him to sleep). And as mentioned, Yu-seok mentioned details that Jin-seok hadn’t told him, and Jin-seok had found the lead that confirmed what had happened.
Yu-seok dropped his façade when the actress for the mom recalled the rest of the family and their covers were blown. Seung-uk explained the truth and whenever Jin-seok denied his crime, Seung-uk would respond irately. But he was even more upset when he realized Jin-seok regained his memory. He asked for the truth and Jin-seok wouldn’t give it to him but Seung-uk deep down inside knew it all already.
I think what Seung-uk was looking for was closure. He just needed Jin-seok to attest that it was his father who was behind the murder. Even though Jin-seok denied it, Seung-uk knew enough. He just needed to know Jin-seok was the killer that his father had hired. I think Seung-uk was more angry when Jin-seok wouldn’t admit to it because his story was incomplete then. But once Jin-seok admitted to killing, Seung-uk let him go. He knew that killing Jin-seok wouldn’t bring back his mother and sister.
Seung-uk was an innocent party who got the short end of the stick in this situation. His father plotted against his mother and he lost everything, his immediate family, his extended family, and all of the money.
Themes
I think the theme was simply that there was no good ending for them all. It was a mistake that ruined lives entirely. It was a mistake for Jin-seok to take on the job but he’d gone too far so when the daughter panicked, he panicked too and killed her, and the mother. But with that he’d already ruined the life of Seung-uk. And with killing the doctor, he’d ruined chances of his brother getting better. Not to mention Seung-uk’s mother and daughter who lost their lives without having done anything. Just a bad time all around.
Overall
As I said, the first part of the movie was thrilling and the second part just felt very desolate. But this was still an okay movie.
Spoilers.
Story
Right from the beginning you could tell something was not right. Jin-seok lived a perfect life. Had a loving family, loving parents, the perfect role model older brother, and they were moving to a nice little house. But right away some things were off. The mover questioned the relationship between Jin-seok and Yu-seok, there were sounds from the room they were never to enter.
One night, the brothers went to the roof for a break in the rain, and as Yu-seok left, he was abducted. Jin-seok was worried sick but his brother returned after 19 days. Things grew eerier afer then. At one point Jin-seok questioned his brother’s limp. One night, Yu-seok snuck out and Jin-seok followed him to a dark alleyway, where he saw two men who had posed as cops (when questioning Jin-seok about the abduction) who called Yu-seok “boss.”
When Jin-seok’s mother came home, he told her about the strange events. She seemed concerned, but behind closed doors, she was calling someone to come home because ‘the punk’ was starting to figure things out. Jin-seok tried to run away, escaping the people he used to call Mother and Father.
He went to the police station and after some questioning it was revealed that he as not a missing person, and that the year was actually 2017, and not 1997 like Jin-seok had thought. He was not a 21 year old student, he was a 41 year old man. So when the movers questioned his relationship with Yu-seok, it was because he looked a lot older than Yu-seok and yet was calling him hyung. I felt like this could have been avoided if the team had just hired internally for movers but as a plot device it was meant to sow the seeds of doubt within Jin-seok.
Jin-seok returned to the house to inquire on what actually happened. The man who posed as Yu-seok explained. There were a mother and daughter who were killed in the exact room Jin-seok was not allowed to enter. It became a cold case but the case was handed to private investigators to look into, and they tracked down the killer as Jin-seok. The problem was that Jin-seok had no memories of the event. Psychologists determined this to be true and that he had dissociative amnesia due to the event being so traumatic. The psychologist suggested hypnotizing Jin-seok to the point right before the crime to see if Jin-seok would regain his memories then. The psychologist posed as Jin-seok’s dad, an actress was hired to be his mom, and Yu-seok’s actor seemed to be in charge of the whole operation. The night that Yu-seok and Jin-seok went to the roof to take a break was the night that they were supposed to introduce Jin-seok to thecrim scene and induce is memories. Yu-seok being abducted was actually him being arrested by the cops for fraud and assault and that threw a wrench into the plan. The team bribed the cops to release “Yu-seok” but they had to wait until the next rainy day for the plan, during which the effects of hypnosis started to wear off.
Jin-seok insisting on his innocence, so as Yu-seok’s actor took him away to ‘deal’ with him, Jin-seok ran away from the van. Yu-seok’s actor chased after him and they both ended up in car accidents.
During surgery, Jin-seok regained his memories. He was travelling to a new home with his family, and on the car ride there, they got into a car crash. His parents perished, and his older brother was in a coma. Due to the financial crisis, he struggled to find work to come up with money to pay for his brother’s surgery. His doctor told him that his brother’s surgery would be time sensitive and implied that Jin-seok would have to come up with the money soon. So Jin-seok took on a dangerous job he found on a chatroom to kill someone. He was sent to the house of the murder, and told to kill only the woman and not the children. Upon seeing the woman, Jin-seok had a change of heart and turned to leave, but the daughter saw him and screamed, which resulted in Jin-seok panicking and killing her. The mother also screamed and panicked when she saw her dead daughter and Jin-seok killed her too. When he turned to leave, he saw the remaining son; Jin-seok told him to hide under his bed and count and that he would bring his mother and sister back, but obviously Jin-seok just left. When he did, he saw that the father of the family was actually his doctor. Jin-seok approached his doctor and his doctor said he needed the money from the insurance company. Jin-seok and the doctor got into a fight and the doctor fell to his death over the building as a result.
The remaining son, Choi Seung-uk, was the man who posed as Yu-seok. He went to Jin-seok in the hospital, ready to lethally inject him. As he did so, Jin-seok apologized, implying that he’d regained his memories. Seung-uk asked Jin-seok if his father was responsible for the murder and Jin-seok denied it, saying it was his own actions. Seung-uk didn’t believe him, because he knew his father had taken out a bunch of life insurance policies on his mother a month before the murder. But after the deaths, his relatives had taken the money and put him in an orphanage.
Seung-uk left Jin-seok. Jin-seok crawled out of bed and lethally injected himself, while Seung-uk jumped out of a window at the hospital. As Jin-seok died, he dreamed about his happiest moment, when he was on the trip with his family to their new home. As he was leaving, he bumped into a child Seung-uk and his family. I think it must have been a dream sequence, Jin-seok’s way of trying to imagine a better ending for them all.
The first half of the movie was thrilling. I had guessed that Jin-seok was being gaslit as the clues were pretty obvious. Jin-seok being overly naïve about s family, odd things being covered up. It reminded me of a few other stories. One was a My Sweet Audrina where a character was basically kept ‘young,’ and also of the episode of Black Mirror where a criminal was constantly brainwashed to relive their crimes as punishment. I felt this story was more of the latter and that Jin-seok was going to be punished eventually.
The second half of the movie, when Jin-seok returns to the house after coming back from the police station, is a tragedy. The story just gets worse and worse. For much of this part I had hoped that Jin-seok was innocent. But when he regained his memories, I had no choice to accept the truth. Whether or not it was his intention, he was a murderer. And it was tragic for both Jin-seok and Seung-uk. For Jin-seok, he was pushed and manipulated to kill to save his brother and he still couldn’t save him in the end. For Seung-uk he lost his whole family and Jin-seok still wouldn’t admit to him the truth, though Seung-uk knew it in his heart. Unfortunately this situation was two families ruined, and honestly, death was the best way to go.
So yes, the movie did end in a pretty depressing manner.
Production
It was alright. The beginning of the movie focused on making Jin-seok’s life as perfect as possible. He lived in a quaint little house that almost felt like a cottage in a fairy tale. In the rest of the first half, it started to feel a bit like a horror, since it still took place in the house that had a lot of hardwood in the structure. The second half felt more like what I would expect from a South Korean revenge series in terms of aesthetics.
The acting was fine. It wasn’t the best I’d seen but I think the story was a little too straightforward to give space for anything else. Which is fine I think.
Characters
Jin-seok
Jin-seok started the movie as an optimistic boy who looked up to everyone in his family. He was living his happiest life. When there were strange things going on, he trusted his family about not letting them worry him. But there started to be cracks in the fantasy and Jin-seok caught on. Why were their weird noises from the locked room and why weren’t any of them allowed to go in? Why did his brother threaten to poke his eye out and why did he change his entire demeanour at night? While Yu-seok tried to convince Jin-seok that it was because he hadn’t taken his medicine and was hallucinating, Jin-seok realized that he hadn’t told Yu-seok about taking a taxi and yet Yu-seok knew. And the piece of lead that had fallen out of the pencil was indeed on the desk. What really cemented the deal was when he overheard his mom on the phone, calling him a punk and such. When Jin-seok went to the police station, I was worried that they’d send him right back into the arms of his captors and write off his entire story, but it did give him crucial information about how he was twenty years older than he was.
After the truth of the crime was revealed, Jin-seok probably felt shocked and that was why he felt he couldn’t have done such a thing. He maintained his innocence. And to be fair I don’t think he was lying, he still had no memory of the crime. It was only in surgery that he started remembering his actions. He felt sorry for them and he did apologize to Seung-uk. He tried to lie to Seung-uk about his father being involved so that he wouldn’t have to know about his father being a bad man, but it did not convince Seung-uk. The circumstances were too perfect. Jin-seok felt ashamed for having ruined the entire family of Seung-uk, so he felt he needed to die anyway, and he lethally injected himself.
I felt that the dream sequence was a dream and that it didn’t happen. I felt it was Jin-seok’s rationalization that he didn’t hate Seung-uk’s family, and in another life he could have become friends.
Seung-uk
Seung-uk was first known to us as Yu-seok, Jin-seok’s older brother. He was the perfect older brother: smart, sporty, handy, kind, popular. Despite that, Jin-seok did not feel jealous of his brother. He looked up to him. Yu-seok had gotten into a car accident and thus had a limp, but he was still the golden child of the family.
Jin-seok and Yu-seok stayed in one room because the other room was supposed to have the things of the previous owner, but we know it was because the team was preparing the crime scene exactly as it was the night of the murder. Being in the same room also enabled Yu-seok to keep an eye on Jin-seok even as he slept.
Yu-seok’s disappearance was very shocking to Jin-seok but he came back in one piece and Jin-seok was so relieved. But Yu-seok was acting kind of weird. At one point, Jin-seok questioned his limp. We would find this out later, but Yu-seok never would have limped, because after the accident he fell into a coma and later died. So this version of Yu-seok never appeared to Jin-seok.
But the strangest thing was when Yu-seok snuck out at night. First, he had nearly poked out Jin-seok’s eye. And after he left the house he became another person: lost his limp, took off his glasses, smoked, and had a group of cronies who called him boss. The cronies, who had appeared to him as police officers, were really weird too, saying Jin-seok had caused issues for their boss.
The next day, Yu-seok tried to pretend nothing had happened and that it was just a bad dream as Jin-seok hadn’t taken his medication the prior day as he had dropped it under the cabinet. But it was because he hadn’t taken the drugs that his memory was clearer (they were intended to put him to sleep). And as mentioned, Yu-seok mentioned details that Jin-seok hadn’t told him, and Jin-seok had found the lead that confirmed what had happened.
Yu-seok dropped his façade when the actress for the mom recalled the rest of the family and their covers were blown. Seung-uk explained the truth and whenever Jin-seok denied his crime, Seung-uk would respond irately. But he was even more upset when he realized Jin-seok regained his memory. He asked for the truth and Jin-seok wouldn’t give it to him but Seung-uk deep down inside knew it all already.
I think what Seung-uk was looking for was closure. He just needed Jin-seok to attest that it was his father who was behind the murder. Even though Jin-seok denied it, Seung-uk knew enough. He just needed to know Jin-seok was the killer that his father had hired. I think Seung-uk was more angry when Jin-seok wouldn’t admit to it because his story was incomplete then. But once Jin-seok admitted to killing, Seung-uk let him go. He knew that killing Jin-seok wouldn’t bring back his mother and sister.
Seung-uk was an innocent party who got the short end of the stick in this situation. His father plotted against his mother and he lost everything, his immediate family, his extended family, and all of the money.
Themes
I think the theme was simply that there was no good ending for them all. It was a mistake that ruined lives entirely. It was a mistake for Jin-seok to take on the job but he’d gone too far so when the daughter panicked, he panicked too and killed her, and the mother. But with that he’d already ruined the life of Seung-uk. And with killing the doctor, he’d ruined chances of his brother getting better. Not to mention Seung-uk’s mother and daughter who lost their lives without having done anything. Just a bad time all around.
Overall
As I said, the first part of the movie was thrilling and the second part just felt very desolate. But this was still an okay movie.