The Abandoned (2006) Review

I love a good mind-bending ghost story. It’s just a great combination of suspense, anticipation, and fear. Not only are you afraid of what you don’t know, but you don’t understand it either, and question everything given to you. The Abandoned is hardly alone when it comes to mashing up these ideas. But it stood out enough to be one of the best 8 Films to Die 4 I’ve seen.

After 40 years of not knowing where she came from or who her parents were, Marie (Anastasia Hille) returns to her birthplace Russia to claim a property left to her by her birth mother. Even before arriving something deep keeps a hold of Marie and leads her to the house where she was born. Once there though, things start to get strange very quickly. The man who drove her to the isolated wooded area surrounded by water disappears into the woods and leaves Marie to find her way to the house, where it just gets worse. When she falls unconscious in the river in an attempt to escape, she comes to lying in the corner of one of the rooms with a man going through her things. He says he is there for the same reason; that he is her twin brother looking for the same answers. From here the siblings are forced to struggle a psychological jungle full of monsters and ghosts.

The Abandoned maintained a constant flow of well-choreographed and intricately placed suspense. Using misdirection and deception, the movie continued to surprise me. But where it failed to really shine was its overall inability to be consistently frightening. It certainly was an advantage to have a character as genuine as Marie. Instead of making the same mistakes we’re used to seeing, Marie was much more mindful of how strange everything was and reacted how I could imagine I would in that scenario. When it came to the conclusion, I was neither pleased nor disappointed. Which really just means it was boring. It was an ending but hardly one that made me glad I watched the entirety of it.

Savage score scares a 3 out of 5 out of The Abandoned. Its redeeming qualities are worth watching, especially with what they achieve on screen for what little is actually there. Gore score teeters on a 4 out of 10. This Abandoned home is filled more with mystery and secrets rather than blood and guts. If you’re interested trying out something a little off the beaten path, hope you can find The Abandoned.