The Forgiven
Director: John Michael McDonagh
Year Released: 2021
Rating: 1.5
Functioning alcoholic David (Ralph Fiennes) and his wife Jo (Jessica Chastain) take a long drive to a party being held by Richard Galloway (Matt Smith) in the middle-of-nowhere Morocco when he accidentally hits and kills a young Arab boy named Driss (Omar Ghazaoui) trying to sell a rare fossil - later, the kid's father Abdellah (Ismael Kanater) shows up to collect the corpse and he asks David to accompany him to bury his son. It's adapted from the novel by Lawrence Osborne, but the need to be as "irreverent" as possible (going past crude) is clearly McDonagh's doing - it also never establishes how any of these characters at the gathering know each other in the first place. To make things worse, it says little valuable about world relations - everyone just seems to be xenophobic (the Caucasians are fond of disparaging a culture that isn't their own while the Moroccans justifiably treat them with contempt) and it holds women in low regard: Fiennes is gone for a day and Chastain's self-centered mess can't stop herself from committing adultery (which she's not all that bothered by). Early on, Jo is seen reading Gide's The Immoralist ... but Camus' The Stranger might have been more appropriate.