‘Forgive Us All’ Looks Great but Lacks Genuine Drama: A Review

What is Forgive Us All about?

One day a man named Noah (Lance Giles) escapes from a nearby “camp,” and he’s chased by a trio who will do anything to stop him and take back what he’s stolen. Noah ends up meeting Rory, and his story gives her a sense of hope for a kind of redemption for her dark past. But to earn her redemption, she’ll have to risk everything.

Forgive Us All was made in New Zealand by Jordana Stott (director and co-writer) and Lance Giles (co-writer, producer, co-star). The couple funded the film themselves after founding a business (Youfoodz) in 2012, building it up, and selling it in 2021. They’ve stated that it was always their intention to get into business with the goal of making enough money to make movies on their own, and they did it. The result is okay.

Forgive Us All Review

I kept the above plot synopsis vague because the main focus of Forgive Us All is on the drama, and I don’t want to give away what drama there is. There’s some action, and there are a few shootouts and chases, but the drama, specifically of Rory’s situation, is what the movie is really about. Unfortunately, creating effective drama is the movie’s weakest aspect.

Before I get to the drama though, there are many positives in the movie. For starters, the movie looks fantastic. The scenery is gorgeous, and the aesthetic quality of the movie (the lighting, camerawork, set design, etc.) is very well done. It’s all very yellow, but I appreciate the tone that the color-grading gives to the experience. The makeup effects are nicely done as well. The infected people look good once we finally get a look at them.

Also, the action scenes are competently done. They’re fine. I will say that some of the editing, especially early on, gets a little wonky. A few of the cuts in early action scenes make certain moments feel choppy in an unintended way, but that becomes much less noticeable as the movie goes on. One action scene that I thought was done excellently happens towards the end of the movie. I can’t tell you what occurs, but the way it’s shown on screen highlights the drama of the situation instead of the physical mechanics of what’s happening. I appreciated that very much because it is effective in the moment. That kind of restraint, of letting the story dictate how events are shown, is nice to see from a first-time director.

However, as I hinted at above, the action in the movie rarely comes from the infected (they’re credited as “howlers”). We hear the infected howl in the distance a few times, and we see a few very briefly in the first hour. But the howlers only show up in numbers during the final twenty minutes of the movie. By that time we can already see where the story is headed, so the howlers never feel like a real threat. They’re more of a means to an end. A howling plot device that quickly becomes predictable. So if you’re looking for an intense action-horror movie, this is not it.

Forgive Us All is about drama. That’s how the movie begins, and that’s how it ends, with drama centered on Rory. We spend a good amount of time with her. We watch as she struggles with daily life, and we watch as she wrestles with decisions. Sadly, what we never get to see are her most defining character moments. We hear her talk about them, and we see flashbacks that lead up to these moments, but we never see the actual moments that haunt her so terribly.

Again, there is death in her past, but we see none of it happen. It’s an odd storytelling choice to keep the most brutal moments of her backstory hidden from our view. It doesn’t allow us to feel her pain. We understand why she’s on the verge of giving up, because she tells us while talking to other people. But we don’t ever feel it. Choosing not to show the most heartbreaking moments from Rory’s past keeps her character at an emotional distance from us, and that undermines the drama of the entire movie.

Since Rory is the main character and we get to know her best, you can probably imagine how thinly the other characters are developed. For example, Rory’s house-mate Otto seems like a good guy, but we don’t get to know him well at all. His past is tied to Rory’s, but there’s only a line or two telling us vaguely what happened to them before the movie started, and that’s it. There’s also a rift within the trio of villains hunting Noah, but their biggest “dramatic” moment falls flat because we never see anything beyond surface-level interactions between them.

If the movie were more plot and action driven, the lack of strong character moments wouldn’t be as big of a deal. Interesting action and violence can keep the pace up, and they are valid focuses for a genre movie like this. But as it is, without stronger character moments, Forgive Us All feels like it drags as we wait for a few confrontations that we know for a fact are eventually coming.

Rating and Recommendation

Further Reading

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