Movie Review – The Abandoned – released 2006
Synopsis: Marie, a film producer, returns to her native Russia to find her birth parents. She quickly learns they are dead, and she has inherited their long-empty farmhouse. At the farm, she meets Nicolai, who claims to be her twin brother. Events take a terrifying turn when the two spot a pair of ghastly doppelgangers and the house itself seems to propel them toward a fate they should have met 40 years earlier.
Rating: Rated R for violence/gore, some disturbing images, nudity and language
Run Time: 1 Hour 39 Minutes
Director: Nacho Cerdà
Dvd Extra’s: The Making of The Abandoned Featurette, Trailers
Nudity Factor: Early scene has a topless female on TV, later scene has a fully nude women in and extended scene as she leads a man down the hall. This includes full frontal and back.
Of Note: Writer Karim Hussain said that the film was inspired by obsessions with family and the double aspects of everybody’s lives. Also, Hussain based his work on some experiences he lived at his father’s farm as a child.
Recommendations:
Rating:
This is a mild horror film that does not have a payoff at the end. What it does have is a spooky location, and a spooky abandoned farmhouse. Marie is trying to find out about her past. This leads her to Russia where she finds out that when her mom passed she was left with an abandoned farm. It has been abandoned for 40 years and is in the middle of absolutely nothing. She also finds out that she has a twin brother and that there is more to the abandoned estate than you would expect.
Overall, this film has some challenges. How the horror elements work are inconsistent. The horror elements are sometime executed well and other times not so well. I will give them that they created a spooky environment, but from there nothing seemed to be all that original. It is not terrible but it certainly is not a great horror film.