[6]

Julianne Moore stars as a woman convinced that she once had a son who died in a tragic plane crash, but everyone around her — including her own husband — insists the boy never existed. The movie is full of revelations, the first of which is that Moore’s character isn’t nuts. A greater conspiracy is at play in the movie, and the less you know beyond that the more you might enjoy The Forgotten. Writer Gerald Di Pego and director Joseph Ruben (The Good Son, Sleeping with the Enemy) bury the mystery deep and hint pretty early on at a science-fiction explanation for things. So think of the movie as a really dramatic episode of The Twilight Zone.

Dominic West (TV’s The Wire) co-stars as a man who lost his daughter in the same plane crash. He joins Moore for most of her journey and the two have good chemistry. Alfre Woodard plays a police detective you want to trust while Gary Sinise plays a psychiatrist you don’t want to trust. The Forgotten is an engrossing mystery that works very well for a while, but its third act tries a little too hard to explain everything when perhaps vagueness would have been better. The theatrical cut features an ending with a hokey visual effect and unnecessary, manufactured menace. The original (alternate) ending is truer to form, if no less clunky.