Director John Michael McDonagh, elder brother to BANSHEES OF INISHERIN Martin, has a habit of getting at characters, put in his films. For married couple David (Ralph Fiennes) and Jo (Jessica Chastian) Henninger, a trip to Morocco for a party, will unravel their collective lives. They arent close, nor might we say happy. David drinks heavily and Jo cheats. They are currently however lost in the desert, attempting to find the party that has brought them many a mile. In an argument over a turning, David accidentally hits and kills a young teenager called Driss. He was carrying little more than an ID and a fossil, often sold to tourists for a healthy profit. Paniced, they bring Driss dead body to their friend Richard Galloway (Matt Smith) party. Richard seems concerned about what might come of David desire to report the death to the police. But as the police arrive and agree it was an accidental death, the case is closed. David saved embarasment but when Driss father Abdellah Taheri (Ismael Kanater) arrives and asks him directly to travel with him and the interpreter Anouar (Saïd Taghmaoui) back to Driss’s home where he is buried, it begins a chain of events that have a deverstating conclusion.

The core to THE FORGIVEN, for most reviews, has been the theme of forgiveness and guilt. Fair enough. For me the film is a meditation on regret and how abstract reconciliation can be in a western sense for those not subject to it. John Michael McDonagh is not new to this. Take his films CAVALRY and WAR ON EVERYONE. Men out of their world, inside a framework that alienates but also redeems them. Fiennes seems to have been choosen directly for this. He has an austere Englishness and steals the show playing to this. His character David is a loathsomely, emotionally inedpt passanger at first, who slowly embraces his destiny as a man, responsible for a murder and seeking redemption through trying to embrace a nativist culture. Counter posed with his hedonistic wife and her friends (obvious Western archtypes of culture, gender and sexual freedoms). It occasionally feels forced. Trying as it does to reconcile two alternatives but finds a refreshing (if not finally expected) conclusion. I felt it rewarded watching. The Blu Ray however is lean, lacks any extra content….