We follow a teenage boy who was previously a victim of bullying. Now he has become the bully. One day he kills another boy with a crossbow, and he and his little gang are in a terrible situation. But he gets away with it. Now he’s a hated person, and his parents aren’t so popular either. So now they have to move around. Because there’s always someone who finds out where they live, and then the mob comes to their home and harasses them.
This is an interesting movie about bullying and how the system fails at all levels. We witness terrible police work and a system where a teenager who has killed a boy at the same age gets away with it.
You hate the protagonist. He has a face you want to punch hard, and the actor suits this role perfectly. This is a character who doesn’t say much, so it’s difficult to understand him. Is it the society he lives in that’s the problem? Why do his parents know so little about him? Why don’t the parents see that he’s a weird boy? Why was he not interviewed by a psychiatrist?
I also hated his mother and father, who are both blind. The mother is overprotective and very naive. You hate the entire family. But then the story changes and suddenly it’s the asshole and his family who in a way becomes the victims. It feels wrong, but they get many of today’s keyboard warriors after them. You know, the weak and pathetic trolls you find on the Internet! The invisible people that you don’t care about if you are up and running. They don’t have any backbone. And there are so many who have mental problems that should have been locked up or they shouldn’t get access to the Internet. We never noticed them so much before until they got connected to the Internet. Then we discovered what a cesspool there is out there. Technology isn’t that great all the time as it makes us stupider. So this is something that Forgiven Children also takes up.
They don’t just harass the teenager who killed the boy. They also harass his parents. So there are many interesting topics the movie addresses, and it doesn’t feed the viewers with the famous teaspoon.
But in the last 20 minutes, I felt the movie crashed into a rock wall. Especially the longer scene with the protagonist who runs, stumbles, and is angry, while his mother runs around searching for him, is a terrible sequence to watch. This sequence lasts a very long time, and it’s meaningless and annoying. It destroys the entire flow. You can call it artsy-fartsy.
The ending isn’t so good. If you don’t like open endings, then I think you will not like the ending in Forgiven Children. It’s a strange ending that was more annoying than interesting. I felt I was being spat on. The teenager who killed the boy who has so many trapped emotions inside of him, changes so quickly as a person without professional help? Is he a normal person suddenly? Is this a joke?
Forgiven Children is a very good and interesting movie, especially in the first two acts. But then comes the third act, and here I wish the creators of the movie could have changed the whole script. They have so many interesting topics on their plate. Maybe a little too much, as the movie never dives deep enough into the various topics it addresses. But even with these flaws, Forgiven Children is a movie worth watching. If, for example, you like a movie like All About Lily Chou-Chou, then Forgiven Children should fall in taste.