Only one month after The Christophers opened in theaters, we have been gifted another film about art forgery in the form of Jing Ai Ng’s debut feature, Forge, which actually premiered before Soderbergh’s film over a year ago at the 2025 edition of SXSW and is a markedly smaller production. Whatever has precipitated this blip in this extreme niche, Ng’s film benefits greatly from its theming as its strengths reveal themselves primarily through the unique milieu it presents and the thorny questions it poses about art.
Set around the fringes of the Miami art scene, Forge splits its attention between a pair of Chinese-American siblings — Coco (Andie Ju) and Raymond Zhang (Brandon Soo Hoo), who make money creating and selling forged artwork — and FBI agent Emily Lee (Kelly Marie Tran), whose scholastic art history background make her an ideal foil to the Zhangs. Coco and Raymond get roped into recreating the destroyed collection of a wealthy start-up founder’s late grandfather, with aims to sell to a big name art dealer. Meanwhile, Emily incidentally insinuates herself into the Zhang’s lives simply by visiting their mother’s restaurant long before she catches on to their operation. This solid setup promises a satisfying, if familiar, converging path crime drama, like if the characters in Heat traded their guns for paint brushes and talked about obscure American painters over their coffee. Forge is most alive when it is doing this act of replacement, transfiguring the usual heist film scenes of planning into sequences of quiet artistic process.
Coco takes pride in her work, meticulously poring over every step in the process of creating a forgery, from weathering the canvas to applying each painstaking brush stroke. She is completely unashamed of what she does — after all, a forged painting is not a mere copy of an artist’s work, but a new work done convincingly in their style. In order to make convincing forgeries she needs to possess not only an extensive knowledge of a painter’s technique, but some amount of insight into their personal history and interiority. And besides, selling high-quality frauds is much more lucrative for an art school dropout than making a go of it with original work. If Emily isn’t fully sympathetic to Coco’s viewpoint, she also seems to have a nuanced take of her own, at one point arguing that if Monet’s Water Lilies were not genuine, its effect on the viewer would likely be unchanged. These ideas around authenticity and the intrinsic worth of art extracted from the context of its creation are Forge’s most compelling wrinkles. But while the film tantalizingly suggests that Coco is artistically fulfilled by her work, it’s also content to largely sideline these intriguing threads.
Which means, we’re left to consider Forge more concretely as an crime film, and in this context, it is frustratingly schematic. The beats play out exactly the way you’d expect, only in a more low-key manner than in a typical heist caper. Coco and Ray take on more risk as the film goes on, and Emily eventually closes in on them. That’s all there is to it, as the film is devoid of the sorts of plot twists or escalations necessary to enliven the thriller genre. Nor does Forge employ much friction: only the film’s opening sequence manages to generate tension out of a situation in which Coco might be found out. Ng’s film goes through the motions, leaning on its theming and character to do the heavy lifting that its narrative cannot, and because its art world probing doesn’t go deep enough to find a truly sticky ideam we’re left with a few interesting questions lacquered over a slow, paint-by-numbers movie that unfortunately never quickens the pulse.
DIRECTOR: Jing Ai Ng; CAST: Kelly Marie Tran, Andie Ju, Brandon Soo Hoo, Edmund Donovan; DISTRIBUTOR: Utopia; IN THEATERS: May 15; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 54 min.
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