Just as the heroine of The Abandoned is lured to a very obviously haunted house, I was intrigued by the prospect of Spanish filmmaker Nacho Cerdà doing a Hollywood-style horror film mostly in English but set in Russia. I was expecting a jumpy Hollywood horror flick melded with some classy European filmmaking. I was disappointed.
It opens in fantastically unsettling fashion though. A peasant family speaking unsubtitled Russian (it’s always creepy when you don’t know what people are saying) get a shock when a speeding truck comes to a halt outside their little shack. The burly father nervously opens the door and inside he finds a dead woman at the wheel and two babies on the floor. The babies’ screams steadily rise in pitch and volume until they morph into the sound of an airplane. Creepy effects used as a transition? Maybe I’d found Euro-Hollywood horror hybrid heaven.
But I hadn’t. Cerdà is certainly capable of a few stylistic flourishes and creates some interesting visuals with his always moving camera. Even during short takes he starts away from his subject and slowly pans across to them. Or shots of characters either through or behind windows, lots and lots of them. It’s unsettling. And there are countless creepy images and ideas, the biggest two being our heroine being haunted by her own future ghost, and a house that is slowly repairing itself to its ‘60s splendor. But the stylistic flair desperately needs anchoring to a solid story and characters, and this is where The Abandoned not only fails, but fails spectacularly.
Marie (Anastasia Hilie) is a Hollywood producer. She’s “born in Russia, raised in England, divorced in the States.†Why? We don’t know. But after 41 years she’s recalled to Russia by a notary to inherit the family farmhouse, where she meets her twin brother Nicolai (Karel Roden) who’s also been summoned. For no reason at all, they avoid any meaningful conversation about being long lost siblings. And even after it’s clear this farmhouse is from the Russian branch of the spooky real estate firm that handled the “Poltergeist†house, our heroine decides to stick around. If she’s really a film producer she must know this is a bad idea.
Quite frankly, our heroine is an idiot. Who puts their signature on papers written entirely in a language they can’t understand? Who trusts a clearly contemptuous man to drive you into the middle of the Russian countryside armed with just a flimsy phrasebook? Who finds out a house is haunted but still opens some very ominous looking doors, even going down into the basement more than once when there’s no real reason to? And who falls asleep, several times, in a haunted house?
When this fool finally decides to flee she crosses the river that encircles the house but somehow still comes full circle back to it. Why? Because it’s supposed to be spooky, but it’s only spooky if it makes some sort of sense. It doesn’t, so it isn’t.
When your own ghost follows you around (and at one point sort of French kisses you, for no reason) then clearly this is one of those circular narratives where characters are doomed to repeat their fate. Circular narratives terrify me, even in old episodes of the The Twilight Zone but only when it’s a surprise. The circular narrative should be the big reveal, adding extra significance to everything that’s gone before. But when it’s very unsubtly hinted at from the very first moment, the surprise is more than a little ruined. The haunted house is surrounded by “a circle of water,†the mysterious notary (and by mysterious I mean evil) runs his hand over the top of a glass in a never-ending circle, and characters actually say things like “don’t break the circle.â€
So we end up with a character and a story running in literal and narrative circles, without proper motivation or explanation, with the smart stylistics only serving to highlight the shallow stupidity of the plot.
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