On the edge of town, next to a landfill, lives a man, broken and forgotten. His life seems empty until he finds a discarded door among the trash. This door opens to any place on Earth, as long as there is a door there too. With each step through this door, the joy for life returns to him. But he discovers an even more astonishing turn in his life when he finds himself in the very place he once decided to leave – his hometown.
Review by Victoria Angelique:
The past can define a person, to the point that it can be detrimental to someone’s life and affect everyone in it as is depicted in THE FORGOTTEN DOOR. This powerful film showcases the story of a homeless man named Bogherty, a man that walked away from his wife and denies having a child because of his own upbringing in an orphanage. The suggestion is that he is afraid that he doesn’t know how to be a parent because he didn’t have the example to teach him, so it’s easier to deny his daughter even exists to spare himself from the pain.
The question of this man’s life arrives at the concept of a door found in the landfill where he’s made his makeshift shed. If a door could change your life, would you open it? This is a great philosophy that is asked of many people and very rarely put into such a vivid concept such as shown through Bogherty’s story. He starts out with little things, stealing food to survive and then using the door to see the world. It’s the harsh words of his ex-wife that still linger in the back of his mind that he can’t shake, no matter what part of the world he can escape to through the door.
This leads to the most important concept behind this film, what is forgotten behind a closed door? In Bogherty’s case, it’s the daughter he never knew and the family he walked away from because he could never face his past. He sees a mother protecting his image to an innocent child, which gives the notion of hope that he might return when he finally puts his past behind him. This leads to a powerful visual of Bogherty closing and locking the door to return home.
The most poignant part behind THE FORGOTTEN DOOR isn’t when Bogherty returns home to embrace his daughter, but the final image. The innocence of a child that suggests the past always lingers behind a closed door and can resurface at any time when the little girl unlocks the closet door, allowing the light to shine through into the bedroom. This also shows that trauma can be placed from parent to child if one is not careful, so the audience can only hope that Bogherty closed the door before his daughter walked through it into the world that resides deep within his mind.
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