There hasn't been an entirely successful psychological thriller since David Fincher's "The Game."

Hear me out. The 1997 Michael Douglas vehicle artfully pushed the genre's framework — a paranoid lead scrambles through convolution toward a surprise ending — into uncharted emotional waters. Perfectly executed, "The Game" is an unheralded classic.

We have those same elements today, but without the invention and hardly a thrill in sight. Generally speaking, thrill-less and formulaic are apt descriptors for "The Forgotten," which sports one hell of a bugged-out premise.

Part ghost story, part update of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," the film stars Julianne Moore as Telly Paretta, a distressed wife — the actress's stock-in-trade — coping with her son's death in a plane crash.

Inexplicably, physical traces and memories of her dead son begin disappearing. Even her husband (Anthony Edwards in a thankless turn) and therapist (the mighty-fallen Gary Sinise) have no recollections of the boy. Paretta is a woman under a supernatural influence.

She meets Ash (Dominic West), the father of another deceased child, and jolts him into remembering his forgotten daughter. The two parents set out to uncover how and why their children never existed to the outside world, a conspiracy involving shady government operatives and — if it wasn't already clear — otherworldly schemes.

It's "Twilight Zone" territory that could've been a baroquely effective picture if it'd been produced during, say, the 1960s. The mind boggles upon considering what Robert Aldrich, John Frankenheimer or even Hitchcock would've accomplished with the material.

Unfortunately, this is M. Night Shyamala-ding-dong's era, and "The Forgotten" unabashedly lifts many of its conceits and scare tactics from his oeuvre, not to mention the "reconciling of a dead child" subplot found in much heavy-handed cinema today.

Granted, the plotting is unnerving and genuinely unpredictable, but there is such a thing as predictable unpredictability. Director Joseph Ruben can't resist telegraphing his scares well in advance via propulsive musical cues, shock edits and the overriding sense that we're being led to a "big twist" at the end.

Execution means everything in a thriller, and all the big twist does is reassure us that the preceding claptrap is almost at a close. It's high time for a revamping of the psychological thriller if "The Forgotten" is what's seen as thrilling.

Grade: CD