Forget Me Not Review

• 4th Jul 2011

Forget Me Not is a slow starting, heavy handed attempt at a love story set over 24 hours. A suicidal pub musician, Will (Tobias Menzies) saves overly sweet, naive barmaid, Eve (Genevieve O’Reilly) from a drunken patron that turns a little too ‘handsy’ at chucking out time. The film is based in London between midnight and midday and concentrates on the relationship that develops between these two characters as they stroll the streets from house party to mini-cab offices, talking, letting their guard down and forming a bond.

The lead characters are fairly easy to watch and have a good chemistry but the film’s script lets them down on numerous occasions. The lowest points in the dialogue include ham-fisted anecdotes about family, love and life in general that lack realism and never really scrape the surface enough for the viewer to feel any sort of empathy with the characters, and the poor attempt at humour falls flat due to this same lack of feeling. There is a rare moment, near the end of the film, which actually shows the potential the film holds, when Eve’s grandmother fails a test for Alzheimer’s and I became thoroughly involved in the relationship, but whether this is down to the film itself or my own involvement in this subject is still up for discussion.

With a clichéd plot and a dodgy script you’d be forgiven for thinking this film really had nothing going for it but thankfully, Alexander Holt and Lance Roehrig, the film’s directors, have shot this bilge beautifully. They make London look absolutely beautiful capturing the “real” London and mixing it in with some visually stunning postcard shots.

It took me a few attempts to actually sit down and watch this film in its entirety but when I finally did manage to get past its weirdly dark opening it was another tedious romance that failed to ignite. The dark and depressing opening to this film, and the twist at the end with Eve’s grandmother detract from the story of Will and Eve’s fledgling relationship. They don’t seem to sit easily together within the same 97 minutes. Quite what they were trying to achieve by sandwiching what could have been a rather sweet love story (had it had a better script) between these mismatched end pieces I’m not sure.

Forget Me Not isn’t even one of those films that will be remembered for being particularly bad, it’s one that’s destined to be consigned to the endless pits of the mind never to be recalled, which is rather ironic given the title. It makes me feel slightly sad that this film lets itself down on so many levels. Even with its super small budget it could have been a lot better if it hadn’t tried so hard to be too many different things at once and had concentrated on being the dramatic love story it holds the potential to be.

Laura Johnson