Macabre...ish Horror Review: The Abandoned
The Abandoned, 2007/ 1 hr 39 min
A movie producer, a woman named Marie (Anastasia Hille), raised in England and divorced in America but adopted from Russia. She spends half her life trying to find her parents and after discovering her mother was murdered, she returns to her family farm, in Russia, to find answers. The island it’s located on has been abandoned for 40 years and nearly impossible to reach. Locals, on the way, do not expect them, Maria and her guide, Anatoliy (Carlos Reig-Plaza), to survive the visit. He says he’d “rather be dead than live like this.”
But the way her mother was killed is a mystery, she died driving a truck to another farm with her and her brother inside, they were infants. But she has no information about her father and no idea that she had a sibling.
On the way to the farm is an immediate since of foreboding. It’s dark when they arrive and the house is huge, still furnished and dilapidated. Also inside, is her or a carbon copy of her but with white eyes.
After fleeing and falling down a hill, she wakes up, back in the house, next to a fire, rescued by a man named Nicolai (Karel Roden). He’s there for the same reason, to find his parents too and he was born on the same day as she. They find evidence of their mother’s last day. The nursery has 2 cribs and their original names on the beds. Mens clothes in a closet. They are getting answers except the big one, what happened here? What is still happening here?
And then they do get many of those answers too but by then, it’ll be too late to escape their fate. Because their fate is here, the beginning and end, it always has been.
This movie is a collab between Spain, UK and Bulgaria and it is haunting and dark, not just visually either, the concept and story is, as well. The physical effects are not bad either. If you like Silent Hill, you might enjoy this! Good pacing, not too gory or bloody but still disturbing, terrifying and sad. Well done!
Pay close attention or you’ll be lost. The audio is English and Russian.