Recent Reviews
Film Review – THE ABANDONED
By Jonathan Stryker

Feb 27, 2007, 00:19

THE ABANDONED is one helluva creepy, frenetic, and disturbing film.  It premiered as part of the “After Dark's 8 Films To Die For” festival in November 2006 and has now been given a limited theatrical release.  Given the intense and dark nature of the film, it is best viewed in a theater for maximum effect. 

Like many other films of this ilk, THE ABANDONED is elliptical in its narrative.  The film begins somewhere in Russia in 1966.  A farming family of three is sitting down to eat lunch when a large truck screeches to a halt in front of their house.  The father of the house takes his gun and cautiously walks out the front door whereupon his frightened daughter and wife stand nearby on the porch.  He slowly opens the driver's side door to reveal a bloodied and dead woman at the wheel, two crying infants lying next to her.

The action flashes forward by 40 years to the year 2006.  Marie (Anastasia Hille), an attractive blonde, visits a lawyer who says that he has contacted her because she has inherited the house that her parents left to her.  Later, a man named Anatoliy (Carlos Reig) drives her in a truck that looks suspiciously like the one at the start of the film and stops short of the inherited estate in the dead of night.  As Anatoliy goes off to check out the house, Marie is left alone in the truck as it begins to rain.   When Anatoliy fails to return, Marie foolishly ventures into the estate with little more than a flashlight.  The house, which is decrepit and in disrepair due to neglect, is obviously deserted and looks like something out of an issue of WEIRD NEW JERSEY.  In the house, Marie hears a baby crying and ventures up to the second-floor.  She finds a child's doll on the floor and her double, or doppelganger, walks past her.  This sight sends Marie running from the house and into a river. 

Later, she awakens in the house in the presence of a man who claims to have arrived a day or two prior to her.  Startled and confused, Marie hits him with a log and runs off.  He catches up to her, and claims to be her brother, Nicolai (Karel Rodin), whom she’s never met.  It becomes obvious that they are the infant twins from the beginning.  He leads her upstairs to the bedroom and shows her where their mother was stabbed; there’s evidence of blood and a knife on the floor.  They fall asleep and later awaken to the sound of Anatoliy’s truck riding by the house.  Marie races outside, only to find the truck parked up against the house as though it’s been there for, shall we say, 40 years.  Marie is beginning to think that she is losing her mind, and is convinced of this when she and Nicolai are confronted with their bloodied dopplegangers.    As their zombie-like doubles walk towards them, Nicolai shoots his double, only to find that he has wounded himself.  He runs off and falls through a hole in the floor, which suddenly disappears, leaving the floor in one piece again.   Marie is near hysterics to explain what is happening.  She meets her double again while hiding in a closet and has an intimate encounter with herself.  Flashes of her mother being murdered in the room appear to her unbelieving eyes.

Marie flees the house and rows in a boat to the other side of the river and runs a good distance until she unbelievably arrives at the house again.  What follows are a series of horrifying incidents that re-enact the night that their father killed their mother and tried to kill them.  Why he did this remains a mystery.

Nacho Cerda has created a visceral cinematic experience.  The camera and editing are fast-paced, but never to the point of nausea.  He fills the Panavision framing with some of the gloomiest images of a decaying building and a flooded and dark basement, the sort of thing one might see in their nightmares.