Forgetting the Girl essentially functions as one long flashback. It presents the rambling recollections of Kevin Wolfe (Christopher Denham), a headshot photographer who records himself as he tries to make sense of the events which lead to his obsessive personality manifesting into very real murder.
The victim who has prompted such reflection is Beth (Elizabeth Rice), one of the many girls whom Kevin has photographed and then harassed until they either went on a date with him or managed to avoid him. Though he remains oblivious to the fact that his assistant is in love with him, Kevin is continually searching for a woman to fill the gaping crater left after the death of his sister, whose drowning death he failed to prevent as a child.
The film is ostensibly a thriller featuring an unhinged protagonist, an obfuscated narrative, and violence that erupts out of the ether and disrupts the ordinary, but there is actually nothing thrilling about it. It’s as if director Nate Taylor believes that simply assembling the base components of a thriller into a linear narrative will create a suspenseful experience.
Instead, Forgetting the Girl plays like an unintentional parody; it’s the kind of film where the line “I knew my baby sister was drowning, and I watched it because it was beautiful” is delivered completely straight as Kevin sobs in close-up and the background of the frame strobes incessantly. The majority of the movie plays like a rote romantic comedy in slow motion: he convinces a woman to go out with him, they sleep together, and then she drifts out of the narrative, often through barely suggested sinister means. This monotony is mercifully shattered at the end of the film when Kevin snaps and violently kills someone, but at that point it’s too little too late and merely feels like graphic violence for its own sake.
With his squinty eyes and off-kilter, nasally inflection, Christopher Denham plays Kevin as an inverse of Patrick Bateman. Whereas Bateman’s sculpted physique acted as a physical manifestation of his power – a façade to used to ensnare and maim his prey – Kevin could not seem more uncomfortable within his own skin. His body is constantly coiled, swimming within clothes that seem a size too big for him. He’s only comfortable behind the lens of his camera, a perpetual voyeur who isn’t searching for a mate to help him forget his sister, but another death to match hers.
Anna Camp makes a brief appearance in an infuriatingly reduced role that functions as little more than eye candy, and while she and Denham attempt to elevate the barely functioning narrative, not even their committed performances are enough to make Forgetting the Girl more than pale imitation of a thriller.
