2020/2021 has been an unprecedented time because of the pandemic, and anyone who finished a movie mid pandemic should be extremely proud of their accomplishment. This is no exception for Kevin and Vickie Hicks, the writer and director of The Forever Room. The film features some really good cinematography, it makes great use of a single location space, the coloring & lighting is impressive for the majority of the film, but overall it’s slightly inconsistent in quality. The lead actors, Samantha Valletta & Vickie Hicks, do a wonderful job and you can feel them really trying their best with the scenes. However, the dialogue itself comes out feeling a bit clunky and stiff.

A woman wakes up to find herself shackled in a basement, with no memory of how she got there. Her horror is amplified when she discovers her captor is her own mother, who assures her that the situation is necessary and “for her own good.” In the days and nights to follow she is beset by strange apparitions and frightening experiences, finding herself precariously balanced on a razor’s edge between reality & insanity, and ultimately forced to face a dark truth.

First off, the clown paintings are horrifying–they could pass for an original Gacy painting. The production design is limited but they do a great job with getting as much mileage as possible from a single space! The hand puppet had me dying of laughter, I’m not sure if that’s what the creators intended it as a moment of comedy but made me laugh either way.

I enjoyed the juxtaposition of the real world “mother” in contrast to the ghost figures haunting our heroine. At first, the other worldly apparitions caught me off guard as I wasn’t expecting a supernatural element to come into play. The performances of the ghosts are hit and miss in the delivery of the dialogue but, again, that’s more a fault of the writing as opposed to the actors. The overused speed ramps come off a bit cheesy but the effect gets the point across of who’s a ghost and who’s not. There were many moments of The Forever Room that I enjoyed, however if you were to ask if it was “scary” the answer is no. The scare scenes don’t exactly work in the sense of creating fear, but that doesn’t detract from the overall quality.

Another key factor as to why the horror doesn’t exactly work is the overly subtle scoring and sound design. There were numerous moments where some sound design and a touch of score would have helped create the thrilling tension needed for the scene. The puppet scenes eventually play up into an almost children’s educational TV show format, and I absolutely loved it–that moment definitely paid off. The flashback sequence itself though was not needed, though. A development is practically spelled out for us with the puppet show sequence itself, so witnessing the entirety of the flashback event feels a little like being spoon-fed.

Overall, The Forever Room is worth a watch. Vickie and Kevin Hicks made the best of the complicated pandemic situation with a fun and provocative psychological thriller.

6 out of 10