Forgive Us All

There is a reason “Forgive Us All” keeps coming up in conversations about action and horror and thriller and western filmmaking since its 2025 release. It is easy to see why it keeps getting recommended long after its initial release.

“Redemption in a world gone dark.” That is the tagline, and it does a surprisingly honest job of setting the tone before a single frame plays. The story is anchored by Lily Sullivan as Rory, Callan Mulvey as Logan, Richard Roxburgh as Otto, and the film spends its first act carefully putting them in each other’s orbit. As an action and horror and thriller and western film, it plays fair with the conventions of the genre while still finding room to surprise viewers who think they have seen it all before.

It helps to think of it less as a checklist of action and horror and thriller and western tropes and more as a mood the filmmakers commit to fully; once you buy into that mood in the first ten minutes, the rest of the runtime pays it off.

Visually, the film does not need a huge budget to communicate scale — a lot of it comes down to confident blocking and a willingness to let a shot sit a beat longer than expected.

Thematically, the film keeps returning to grieving mother, post-apocalyptic, virus, zombie — recurring ideas that TMDB’s own tagging picks up on and that show up in how the story is structured scene to scene.

Further down the call sheet, Lance Giles, Bree Peters, Lawrence Makoare round things out, and the film is generous enough with screen time that none of them feel like an afterthought.

If you are watching with other people, this is also a solid pick for a group — the action and horror and thriller and western elements give everyone something to react to without requiring a ton of setup or prior context.

Jordana Stott clearly has a specific visual language in mind, and it is consistent from the first scene to the last, the 93 minutes runtime is used efficiently — there is very little fat to trim, and Lily Sullivan in particular carries scenes that could easily have felt like filler in less capable hands, it is clear Five Films (NZ) put real resources behind getting the details right.

Bottom line: if action and horror and thriller and western is anywhere near your wheelhouse, “Forgive Us All” earns a spot on the watchlist. It is not trying to be everything to everyone, and that focus is exactly why it works.

It is the kind of film people tend to return to specifically because it does not overexplain itself the first time through — there is more to catch once you already know the shape of the story.

It is worth saying plainly that this is not a film trying to reinvent anything; it is a film trying to execute a familiar shape as well as it possibly can, and on that measure it mostly succeeds. Approach it on those terms and it is hard to walk away disappointed.

Bottom line: if action and horror and thriller and western is anywhere near your wheelhouse, “Forgive Us All” earns a spot on the watchlist. It is not trying to be everything to everyone, and that focus is exactly why it works. Go in with reasonable expectations and let the film set its own pace.