Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Forgiven’ on Hulu, a Rocky Satirical Thriller Mostly Saved by Jessica Chastain and Ralph Fiennes

The Forgiven, now on Hulu, pairs Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain for a somewhat satirical thriller that oh so desperately wants to feast on white privilege. John Michael McDonagh (Calvary) writes and directs, adapting Lawrence Osborne’s novel about a rich-person retreat sullied by a tragic accident. It tries, and nearly succeeds, at balancing glibness and sincerity, and thankfully has charismatic leads to fall back on when it tips too far in either direction.

THE FORGIVEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Jo (Chastain) and David (Fiennes) are participating in leisure. Definitely leisure. Pronounced LEH-zurr. Draw out the R a little. They’re on a boat to Tangier. Then they’re in a BMW, wearing driving gloves and sunglasses that are more expensive than your furniture. They’re husband and wife. They hate the shit out of each other. She calls him a functional alcoholic and his response is to say that “functional alcoholic” is an oxymoron. It’s nighttime and they’re driving down a dark desert road out to the middle of the Sahara for a party. They’re bickering about one of those things that triggers great marriage stress, directions, when suddenly there’s a man in the road. They hit him. He’s dead.

That man is Driss (Omar Ghazaoui). He’s more of a boy, though. A teenager, who we first meet as he digs in the desert for fossils. That’s what people here do – dig up fossils, of trilobites and such, to sell to rich tourists who use them as decor. One bathroom renovation could fuel the local economy for quite some time, quips one character. But here’s Driss, now a lifeless body, being lifted out of the back of the BMW and taken to a castle, where he’ll be quite the drag on Richard (Matt Smith) and Dally’s (Caleb Landry Jones) grossly indulgent weekend rich-person bash, where the dress code is head-to-toe cynicism, draped generously atop empty humans. A dead person? Ugh. Puts such a damper on dinner. The main course? Loathing. Of themselves. And everything else, for that matter.

Driss’ father, Abdellah (Ismael Kanater), comes to collect his son. David and Jo prepare to be shaken down for money. But Abdellah wants David, the man responsible for the boy’s death, to come with him and bear witness to the mourning and burial. It feels vaguely threatening. David would rather cough up a pile of dough – “They could be f—ing ISIS for all we know!” he crassly splutters – but somehow ceases to be a shitheel for a while and agrees to go. So as a rich person does his damnedest to live outside his comfort zone for two days (I pause here so you may gasp accordingly), the party goes on without him, most notably including moments where Jo and an American fellow named Tom (Christopher Abbott) flirt. Did I mention that an extravagant fireworks display over the castle fired off just as Abdellah and his friends loaded Driss’ body in the car? Richard and Dally almost feel bad about that. Almost.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Everything from Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth to The Great Gatsby to Crash (2005) to Caligula, with a touch of Casablanca and ’40s noir.

Performance Worth Watching: Do you want to watch Fiennes filet strips of ugliness off his character as he tries to find his heart? Or Chastain being fizzy, nasty, bored, elitist but not quite wholly irredeemable as Jo pretends to worry about her husband’s fate? Both can be rather tasty.

Memorable Dialogue: A particularly choice exchange as David and Jo watch tourists at a buffet in Tangier:

David: Look at them. Continental wildebeests. You’d think they hadn’t eaten in days.

Jo: Maybe they don’t give them any sandwiches on those buses.

Sex and Skin: A sex scene where the naughty bits go unseen.

Our Take: Be thankful we don’t spend the entirety of The Forgiven with the rich white people. The first act teems with these a-holes, and it’s a damn miserable time. They’re eating and drinking and jumping fully clad into swimming pools, having “fun,” but every sniping tidbit of wretched condescension and criticism they utter successfully swamps the proceedings in nihilism. Is it funny? Or is it just insufferable? I lean toward the latter.

Thankfully, we don’t spend all our time with these people, as the narrative splits between Jo at the castle and David’s journey, which is suspenseful and earnest in contrast to the party’s staid phoniness. Be grateful that Chastain elevates the latter scenes from the sludge with a performance that’s vampy yet understated, mostly entertaining even when she seems to be clambering for a sympathetic trait in her character – a trait that never seems to manifest. We find her slippery and frustrating.

So the film relies on the Fiennes plot to engage our emotions. It sticks to David’s point-of-view, stirring up his paranoia – Abdellah surely wants to teach this reckless and arrogant man a lesson, but how will he do it? He’s in a terrible spot. Abdellah is, I mean. He’s grieving the loss of his only child, and so full of pain and rage. He needs to express those feelings, or they’ll curdle inside him. He doesn’t want David to buy his way out of the situation, and neither do we. And as this narrative track explores penance and redemption, the other Westerners in the film indulge in a massive, wasteful party in the homeland of a people who quite literally dig through the dirt to maintain their survival. There’s more to The Forgiven than bullseyeing the colonizers – fish in a barrel – but just barely. Maybe telling the story from the common Moroccan’s viewpoint would have been more righteous, and satisfying.

Our Call: STREAM IT, but keep your expectations modest. Despite giving us a couple salty strands of thematic jerky to gnaw on, The Forgiven is narratively and thematically messy. But Chastain and Fiennes elevate it to watchability.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.