The Abandoned (Spain, 2006)
Another English language Spanish production (Like The Others), I was first drawn to this film after comparisons with Silent Hill, and being quite a fan of the games, I was intrigued. Reviews were bad, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by some B-movies before, so I thought I’d give it a go.
The film opens well enough with a family on a farm somewhere in Russia, disturbed by a large truck pulling up outside their house, the father grabs his gun and goes to inspect it, finding a woman fatally wounded and two infants beside her. From there we are introduced to Marie (Anastasia Hille), she was adopted, and travels to Russia to find out about her history. There, she meets with a notary who informs her of her mother’s murder, and that she now owns the farmhouse.
She travels there with a guide, who leaves her once they arrive. Marie explores the house, and while chasing what she believes to be her guide, runs into a ghostly vision of herself, and almost drowns in a river while trying to escape the house. Marie is rescued by her twin brother Nicolai (Karel Roden), whom she has never met before, and together they explore the secrets of the house.
Honestly, I wanted to like this film, but I didn’t.
As well as comparisons with Silent Hill, which are evident from the outset, there’s definitely a lot of influence from The Shining and the films of Lucio Fulci, such as The Beyond. However, Spanish director Nacho Cerda never really achieves the same levels of greatness with his film, despite displaying some excellent direction and creating some very atmospheric and scary scenes.
There’s quite a bit to like in the film, some very standout moments that did indeed scare me, and the two leads are great in their roles. One aspect that I appreciated was that the lead characters are mature adults in their 40′s, and it does make a nice change. It’s also nice to see Karel Roden as a protagonist, rather than the standard Russian/Eastern European villain roles he gets, as he’s quite a talented actor.
Sadly, while the film does have moments of glory, and it certainly does look terrific a lot of the time, most of what I liked about The Abandoned is contained in the first half or so, and the second half drags quite a lot. After an hour, I was quite bored and I really wished the film makers could have kept up the pace, but it was almost as if it had run out of steam and resorted to throwing cliches at the audience.
I really don’t want to see another sequence of a woman hiding in a closet. It’s been done in Halloween, it’s been done in Haute Tension, and god knows how many other times, and it doesn’t offer anything new here. The fact is, it’s actually slightly frustrating, considering that there was one highly original scene (Don’t worry, I won’t spoil it) that not only scared the shit out of me, but put a huge grin on my face.
Another scene that I found frustrating was where the house shifted from the old ruin to when it was lived in, we’re treated to a lot of very loud noises, pots and pans hopping back up on shelves, wooden panelling slapping itself back on walls and so forth, but the problem is that it’s a very overlong sequence, far longer than it needed to be, and it started getting quite grating. Add to that, a quite annoying end narration, and The Abandoned goes from quite a good viewing, to a very irritating one rather quickly.
It’s perhaps rare for me to say this, but even at the 90-odd minute running time, it seemed over long, with some sequences that seemed like filler. I’d nearly say it was short film material, stretched out to standard horror running time. It’s not a film I could possibly recommend, but if you’re a horror fan, then you might find it to be a quite flawed but enjoyable experience.
Source: The Abandoned
