The Forgiven

The Forgiven takes the harder road, and actually proves more engrossing and haunting in retrospect than when you’re actually watching it. In an era of instant gratification, that, for all the film’s evident flaws, is still worth chin-stroking respect.

This brutal clash of cultures forms the core of the drama.

Comes closer to embodying the tragic futility of two irreconcilable cultures attempting understanding, rather than properly deconstructing it.

... A gathering of cartoon ciphers who seem to have been created solely to allow McDonagh access to his favourite anti-woke whipping sticks.

Beneath the garishly brittle portrait of ghastly westerners lording it up in Morocco, there’s a low-key, brooding quality to this accomplished if somewhat inert screen adaptation of Lawrence Osborne’s 2012 bestseller.

The stiffness in the writing and general lack of subtlety leave this feeling underwhelming and overwrought. As a moral fable, The Forgiven offers little genuine critique.

…McDonagh’s unwillingness to characterise the Moroccan characters beyond surly servants and mute witnesses feels very old-fashioned and insensitive…

There are plenty of squirm-worthy moments...of neo-colonial privilege...[b]ut there is...redemption in its later half...contrasting the wild life of privilege of the rich partiers against the struggle to simply live of the people whose land it truly is.

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.

The film flits between tragedy, vengeance yarn and morality tale with an occasionally uneven tone, as if trying to weave two or three disparate stories into one.