The Forgiven movie review & film summary (2018)

Just look at the way that Blomfeld's crimes are primarily considered through the lens of his repugnant personality. Bana gives Blomfeld a swaggering bravado to match his Freddie Mercury-looking tache, and it makes his character's constant use of the "kaffir" racial slur even more sickening. Blomfeld also plainly lays out his disgusting worldview during a preliminary interrogation scene that serves a weirdly similar function to the one in "The Dark Knight." The main difference is that the Joker doesn't go as far as Blomfeld, who boasts about dreaming of a Charles Manson-esque race war where the inevitable "winner who emerges will be white." Blomfeld also tells the Archbishop frankly that he's "killed lots" because he enjoys it, and only submitted a request for amnesty that features quotations from Milton and Plato because he knew the Archbishop could not resist such a challenge. 

Still, the Archbishop takes Blomfeld's bait, partly because the former man is the leader of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. The Archbishop—still with us—also believes in the Committee's goal of forgiveness. Unfortunately, Joffe and Ashton don't try very hard to get viewers to see the world through the Archbishop's eyes. Most of his perspective is broken down through solemnly intoned fortune cookie speechifying, like "Brutality is the aberration, Mr. Blomfeld, not love," and "You cannot change what is over, or where you have been. But you can change where you now go." There's nothing theoretically wrong-minded about asking viewers to applaud the Archbishop's saint-like patience. But these platitudes sting when they're dispensed in a film that spends way too much time with Blomfeld as he taunts, snarls at, and insults everybody within earshot.

Worse still: there are only three other types of normalizing scenes in "The Forgiven":

1) A distracting sub-plot concerning "the 28's," a gang of black South African prisoners who are depicted as being highly territorial, and violent. Members of the 28's, including neophyte Benjamin (Nandiphile Mbushu), don't ever talk about what makes them so angry or vicious. In fact, this sub-plot doesn't really have a resolution, save perhaps for a scene where Blomfeld teaches Benjamin to remove blood-stains with vinegar, and then makes a vague pronouncement about how prison is "the best school."