When I was a teenager me and my best friend at the time used to go to Blockbuster Video (that’s how long ago this was) and rent several horror movies to watch on a Friday night every couple of weekends. I remember watching The Abandoned for the first time around ten years ago on one such occasion, and being thoroughly terrified by it.
For ages afterwards I had the clear image in my head of a deadly doppelgänger shuffling towards me and thinking it was one of the scariest things I had seen. As time passed I forgot the name of the film but not the impact it had had on me, and eventually I wanted to rediscover it and see if it still had the same effect. It was a hard film to find, as it wasn’t a particularly big release, and I had to spend a lot of time performing weirdly specific Google searches such as “horror movie with repairing house” and “horror movies with people getting eaten by pigs” until I found it.
I kind of wish I hadn’t found it, however, as whilst I still think The Abandoned is pretty creepy, it’s nowhere near as scary as I remember it being. Perhaps that’s because I’m older now, or have seen much scarier films, or because my memory of it (especially of the creepy zombie doppelgängers) was scarier than the film could ever be. I’m not sure. Either way, whilst The Abandoned is still a film that you won’t want to watch alone, poor plotting and an over-reliance on the doppelgänger idea to provide scares hampers it from being as good as it could be.
The Abandoned is set in Russia, and it does that thing that so many movies tend to do and portrays Russia as nothing more than a backwoods kind of country, full of creepy villages and even creepier villagers. It’s a cliché that’s definitely getting less and less effective, let alone irrelevant. Anyway, main character Marie (Anastasia Hille) arrives at one of these villages on her journey to get to her family’s old farmhouse. Marie is an orphan, born in Russia but adopted out to English parents. Now she has returned to homeland and is seeking answers.
Marie travels with a man called Anatoliy (Carlos Reig-Plaza) to the farmhouse of her birth, and gets dropped off in the forest in the middle of the night because this is a horror movie, so of course she does. Anatoliy then disappears, because of course he does, the truck battery goes flat, because of course it does, and Marie wanders off through the forest towards the farmhouse, because of course she does.
Upon stumbling into the farmhouse, which looks like it was modelled on concept art for a Resident Evil game, Marie is horrified to find a doppelgänger of herself, except this Marie is clearly dead, with horrifying white eyes. There are some pretty good scares in this sequence, mainly thanks to the good camera-work that favours close shots and odd angles. Marie is able to escape from the doppelgänger but falls into the river surrounding the farmhouse, nearly drowning. She is rescued by Nikolai (Karel Roden), who turns out to be her long-lost twin brother. Turns out he’s here for the same reason she is – it’s time to get answers about what exactly happened here so many years ago.
The rest of the film involves the twins being pursued by their doppelgängers and realising they can’t kill them or they too will die, Marie trying to escape from the house but finding herself going in a circle like something out of a Blair Witch film and eventually Nikolai revealing the truth about what happened and why the doppelgängers exist. Turns out the house is trying to kill them to set right what should have happened forty-two years ago, when their father tried to murder both of them along with this wife. I don’t know how Nikolai knows this – it’s never explained. I also don’t know why the father tried to murder his whole family – that too is never explained.
It’s a shame that The Abandoned has such a wonky plot because it can be genuinely very good at times. The doppelgängers are initially very scary, with their off-putting visual design and slow but constant pursuit. There is one terrifying sequence where Marie hides in a cupboard to escape her pursuer, only to find that she’s not alone in her hiding spot. The doppelgängers do lose their effectiveness as the film goes on, as it really is a case of less is more and they become less and less scary the more we see of them, but those first few encounters will definitely make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. These scares are enhanced by the sound design of the film, which utilises off-putting noises like babies crying and pigs squealing to great effect, combined with the constant thrumming of the score.
The acting in the film is also good for a horror title, a genre which unfortunately often contains so many bad turns from actors. Anastasia Hille is great at being scared without ever being over-the-top, and Karel Roden is equally as convincing. The director, Nacho Cerda, made a conscious effort to use unknown actors despite the studio that produced the film pushing for stars like Nastassja Kinski or Holly Hunter, and that choice makes Marie’s character even more believable. We as the audience just see Marie the character, not the actress behind her.
So, should you watch The Abandoned? Well, despite not being quite as good as I remembered, I still think The Abandoned is a pretty creepy flick. It’s made well and stands above other lower-budget horrors of its ilk. It’s not the best horror flick ever, not by far, but I still recommend it.
BEST BITS
- The visual design of the doppelgängers. Ugh!
- The score is really effective, something which can completely make-or-break a horror flick.
WORST BITS
- The ending makes no sense at all.
- The tension of the doppelgängers disappears when they start showing up every five seconds.
FINAL RATING: 6/10
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