Of the dozen or so shorts shown at the festival last night (8/11/2023) this is the one I came home talking about. It got the biggest audience response and the hardiest applause. Let's get one thing clear: I'm rating this out of the small universe of short films with which I'm familiar. At festivals like this one, many of them are more like finger exercises at the piano - directors/writers/crew proving that they can establish a moment, light it, shoot it, edit it, add sound to it, and put something on the screen that looks like it should be in a feature film. We Forgot could certainly be a sequence in a feature film, but it stands on its own entirely, and in my opinion shows what you can pull off if you have an idea - even a goofy idea - and believe in it enough to go at it with conviction. That's what we saw in We Forgot.
I have to accept that there is a bit of a spoiler out already in Coventry's review, spelling out cure, cute, cake, curse and so on as the labels on the syringes. The gag is that only the C and E are visible, and we are shown very quickly (that's a key element) that the labels are all different, and unpredictable. We get invested pretty fast in figuring out what the label was from the result of the injection.
Think about close-up magic. Someone does something right in front of you, and you know it's a trick, and you get caught up in trying to see it, since it's right there, a foot or two away from your eyes. And if the magician is good, skillful, and best of all clever, then you are left surprised, amused and completely entertained, knowing that you were looking right at the action and missed the trick. That's very much what happens in We Forgot.
It's "only" a short, so it's not realy worth going any further into this, and it would be difficult to do without more spoilers. There's only a few minutes of action to deal with after all.
The two guys are somewhat dimwits. That's a fair characterization. The accusation that the premise is not presented well is way, way off. This short was one of the few that, although it could be in a longer film, stood solidly on its own, with a beginning, a middle and an end. It's the first one we all talked about when we convened outside the screening room.
I stepped in to review this because I thought the rating of 3 stars was a gross injustice. I'm on the record with my 8 now, and if you get a chance to see this, go see it. By the way, the success of the trick depends on some very successful editing and pacing in the middle section, so don't overlook that there is considerable skill on display here.
Enjoy.
