The Forgotten

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * )

It's hard to remember when so much talent was expended to so little effect as in this film. It starts as a mystery, turns into a conspiracy thriller and, finding all the exits blocked, walks through the wall in the last reel and becomes some sort of science-fiction horror flick.

The normally reliable Moore sleepwalks through her performance and, even with the assistance of some heavyweight acting talent from both sides of the Atlantic, director Ruben (who made the brilliantly creepy The Stepfather) can't rescue a story that should have been sent back when it was first pitched.

Moore plays Telly Paretta, a Brooklyn book editor struggling to get over the grief of losing her 9-year-old son in a plane crash. The little time she doesn't spend staring at photographs and videotapes of him she spends talking to her therapist (Sinise) who is gently trying to persuade her that remembering and forgetting can be acts of will.

The film starts cleverly, stealthily setting up the possibility that Telly may be delusional (the photographs disappear and people close to her start telling her that she never had a son).

And there's an eerie half-hour or so in which we are not sure who's imagining what: was Ash, the man down the street (West), bereaved in the same disaster? Is he a figment of her imagination? Or proof of some sort of conspiracy?

"Our children have been forgotten," she insists as she and Ash set about trying to remember them back into life.

It's an engaging enough premise but stories like this work only if the final explanation for what's going on has some shred of plausibility. Writer Gerald di Pego, whose career has been long rather than distinguished, sacrifices that pretty early on.

Instead the movie relies on cheap thrills - at least one of which, a sudden, passenger-eye-view car crash, is pretty damn effective - and doesn't concern itself with being coherent or believable.

The most ludicrous sequence involves a chase through a half-demolished slum whose owners have been kind enough to brightly light all the places the action will occur. But by that time, the whole undertaking seems like some sort of weak comedy.

CAST: Julianne Moore, Dominic West, Gary Sinise, Alfre Woodard, Linus Roache

DIRECTOR: Joseph Ruben

RUNNING TIME: 95 minutes

RATING: M (violence and offensive language)

SCREENING:Village, Hoyts, Berkeley