Movie review: The Abandoned

Movie review: 'The Abandoned' should have been (Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune)

By Erin Meister, Boston Globe

They always say self-discovery can be difficult, but what happens when it becomes a hazard to your health? In "The Abandoned," a dewy, ambitious screamfest from Spanish director Nacho Cerdá, a woman orphaned in Russia and raised by adoptive parents in America is called back to her native soil to claim family land she's never seen.

Although her lawyer tells her she is the only surviving next of kin, Marie Jones (Anastasia Hille) soon discovers there are more than just family secrets hidden in the crevices of her mother's decrepit farmhouse. Trapped in a nightmarish revolving door of flashbacks she finds herself eyeball-to-eyeball with a grisly vision of what seems to be her threatened and dismal future.

With a "Lost"-meets-"The Haunting" plot and a few convoluted thematic twists, "The Abandoned" limps into a nebulous kind of horror netherworld, peppered with painfully long tension-building sequences and unimaginative dialogue. Cerdá has artistic sights but grind-house tastes; atmospheric landscapes and ingenious time-warp sequences are cheapened by unbelievable set design -- the deserted farmhouse is in as much meticulous disrepair as Disney World's Haunted Mansion ride -- and unimpressive special-effects makeup.

While some of the subtler spookiness is mildly spine-tingling, the big shocks are embarrassingly predictable ("Don't open that door!"), and every character suddenly turns into a MacGyver-style survivalist in the face of extreme danger and/or the undead.

Perhaps the worst offense of "The Abandoned," however, is that so little effort is made to make any sense of it all. Simply setting a film in Russia isn't allowance to leave questions unanswered, and doing so makes the film more of an exercise in audience torture than titillation.

"There's no way out of the circle," one of the farmhouse's ghostly residents taunts, but the collective groan from the audience implies that just a way out of the theater will do.