The Abandoned (2006)

“Russia sure is a confusing country.”
I said this very phrase to Jeff as we recently watched this movie on DVD about ¾ of the way through it. It confused the hell out of me. At the end of the movie I had to think back through it to try to connect the dots to figure out the course of events and why what happened happened.

From what I have gathered from piecing together my understanding of the movie, the plot is this: An orphan woman returns to the abandoned farm in Russia where she was born. The farm is on an island in a river. Whilst traipsing around the very dilapidated homestead, she bumps into a guy who says he is her fraternal twin and their birthday is less than two days away. They keep bumping into doppelgangers that appear to be dead versions of themselves that sort of chase them around. Through ghost-flashback vision she learns that her father fatally stabbed her mother because she threatened to leave with the babies, then the mother shot the father. Through another location/time slip, the woman appears in the office where she originally started her trek from and learned that the ghost of her father was the one who sent her to the family farm. On the way out of the office she bumps into herself from the beginning of the movie. Then she time/location slips back to the family farm where she and her brother meet their fates and die in the manner that their doppelgangers’ appearances suggested, shortly after their dual birthday which the movie made to seem important but I could not figure out why. What a country! (Whatever happened to Yakov Smirnoff?)

What this movie did have in bucket loads was atmosfear. Unrelenting creepy spooky unnerving locations that the characters stumbled around in were present throughout the movie. There were also some great visual effects that I thought were pretty inventive. At one point the heroine is panning across a darkened room with a flashlight. The room is in complete disarray, mildewy bed, paint chips spread like confetti, wallpaper coming off in ragged sheets, splintered and rotting furniture, etc. As the beam of the flashlight plays across this miasma of decay, the beam reveals what the room looked like when her parents were alive.

Another element in the plus column for this movie was the use of sound. The creaks and groans of this unsettled house were omnipresent as well as all the disturbing noises from the ethereal flashbacks the heroine had.

3 Georges