Forget Me Not (2009) - 2.5/4

After a mildly mysterious, but not particularly encouraging pre-title sequence, Forget Me Not introduces us to a menagerie of tedious high school seniors and their sad little lives of fucking and drinking. Quite nice camera movements are wasted on a student house party that looks like the student house parties you see in every high school comedy or drama since the '90s, with lots of attractive, half-naked teens drinking and writhing, "having fun". I don't make a point of describing this lifestyle in a deliberately contemptous tone because I was never invited to these parties, but because I think the director, and co-writer, Tyler Oliver, purposely sets up a 'normal' (as defined by movies) group of high school buddies to disarm us. Then he starts to screw with it--and that's when it gets fun.

In the middle of a round of "tell your first time" the responsible Final Girl character, Sandy, decides to tell her first kiss instead, which took place during The Game. "The Game!" everyone says, "let's play!" Their banal existences suddenly take on some meaning, a tinge of mystery. What is this bizarre game these bland people play? Well, they chant a creepy chant about ceasing to exist and going to hell, pronounce one person "The Ghost" and then the rest hide. The Ghost touches each one, making them ghosts, until there's only one non-ghost left. When they play this game again, a strange girl joins in. After she appears to commit suicide and then disappear, despite having won The Game, each participant starts disappearing in real life. The catch is that the only one who remembers the ghosted participant is the Final Girl. Everyone else forgets that person existed. The whole world changes, as though that person never existed.

Forget Me Not plays out as a fun metaphysical mystery, not unlike one of those episodes of Star Trek where they'd get trapped in a time loop or some godlike being's anus. And the drive to crack the mystery, the full solution to which Oliver manages to hold out of reach for a good while, is what kept me engaged. Even after the mystery is cracked, there are some metaphysical shenanigans that will keep the intellectually-engaged viewer interested. For instance, the pattern of The Game played in the first act dictates much of what will happen for the rest of the movie. What is the significance of that?

Of course, interest does not equal plausibility. One wonders just how a person can be erased from the time-space continuum. The most superficial answer provided is strongly inadequate. And the other possible answer, suggested by the final shots, isn't explored in quite enough detail, tantalizing as it is. As allegory, however, it presents an interested interplay of how individual lives vie to be remembered, how our lives are valuable after death mostly for the way we impact the living, whether a close friend or the whole world. Death is frightening, but being forgotten may be even worse. You have to do something worthwhile to be remembered. And when we watch the first ten minutes of the movie, we wonder how many of these young people will really deserve to be remembered, and how many will go the way of the third eunuch in the Court of Tiglath-Pilesar?

Forget Me Not does also contain some proper ghost-monster action that is not as successful as the rest of the film. For horror zonks, the gittery, fast-moving ghost-monster, with its 'crick'-'crick' body sounds and large-mouthed roar, will be mildly annoying, because we see this monster in every low-budget supernatural horror movie, sometimes even on youtube. Otherwise, they're fairly creepy creations out of which Oliver gets some good mileage. Forget Me Not has a good many creepy, spooky moments, the best of which are, naturally, of a more metaphysical variety.