The Abandoned Spain/UK/Bulgaria,
R, 99 m, 2007
The
past and the present have it out in The Abandoned, a relatively muted
spook show from Nacho Cerdà, the warped soul liable for Aftermath, a
short subject so repellent that it forever tainted any screen upon which it
played. (And the less said about that film, the better.) The Abandoned is
Cerdà’s first feature-length effort, and though his sense of how to dress a
frightening scene remains as dead on as ever, the script (which he co-wrote with
Karim Hussain and Richard Stanley) doesn’t pony up enough (good) ideas to
justify a running time of ninety-nine minutes. Cerdà and company hungrily rifle
through a bag of shopworn tricks on loan from Tartan’s Asia Extreme horror
shows (such as fleeting shots of wan, white-eyed creeps), but the film’s
climactic journey through time by way of supernatural forces (which may remind
you of Julianna Margulies’ mystical saunter through the Antonio Graza’s
bloody times of yore in Ghost Ship) accounts
for the most compelling bit here—everything else feels like window dressing. I
don’t mean Mr. Cerdà any disrespect by suggesting that he should stick with
the short form, but features need a lot more than atmospherics to keep an
audience hooked. For most, dialogue is a prerequisite (at least as far as sound
pictures go), which until now Cerdà has shied away from. I’m almost sure that
the talk here is a commercial concession; it’s largely perfunctory and
doesn’t serve to advance the plot—it just fills the air like the stench of
mold in an old, damp cellar. But the bee in Cerdà’s bonnet lies with the
moving image. He’s a silent filmmaker at heart. Anastasia
Hille (The Hole) plays Marie, a middle-aged American film producer who
returns to her home country, Russia, after inheriting the old, secluded
farmhouse where she was abandoned years earlier as a baby. She hopes that the
trip will shed some light on what became of her biological parents, but
something else—some strange, unseen force—is pulling her to the motherland.
The house, which has been avoided for years on account of a local legend that
claims the place is damned, has fallen into terrible disrepair: there’s lots
of peeling paint, rickety floor boards, leaking ceilings—you know, the type of
ramshackle abode where you might find Tyler Durden squatting. But it looks like
the biggest problem Marie will have getting this web-infested place livable
again is the waterlogged ghoul—her ghostly double—that keeps popping up
around every dark corner. Soon
from around one of those dark corners appears Marie’s long-lost twin brother,
Nicolai (Karel Roden of Hellboy), who was also compelled to return to the
fog-enshrouded house to learn more about his family’s shadowy past. But he
wasn’t counting on having to contend with an irksome spook that bears his
features—save for the unsightly wounds and ashen skin. The seemingly fatal
injuries bore by their undead doppelgangers foreshadow Marie and Nicolai’s own
fates, and they’re powerless to change it: whatever damage they do to these
walking corpses also happens to them. And soon our heroes are literally running
in circles—a sort of cosmic loop from which they can’t escape. (It feels
like one of those fever-induced dreams where you’re stuck doing the same
damned thing over and over again.) When Marie and Nicolai are somehow sucked
forty years into the past, they become spectators to their father’s vicious
knife attack on their mother. But now the Grim Reaper wants Marie and Nicolai
committed to the ground, too, for they cheated him by not dying with their
mother on that horrible day. This
all may sound like scary stuff, but its execution proves otherwise: we’re way
too familiar with The Abandoned’s “old dark house” trimmings to be
shaken up by them. But the cast seems game; they give Cerdà their all.
Anastasia Hille isn’t a particularly photogenic actress, but what she lacks in
the looks department she more than makes up for with her exceptional acting
ability. Karel Roden holds his own as Nicolai; he gives a good morose
performance. The photography by Xavi Giménez (Genesis) is appropriately
grayish in tone, and Alfons Conde’s creepy score accentuates the washed-out
palette. The Abandoned is one of the “8 Films to Die For” from the 2007 After Dark Horrorfest, and, despite its faults, it can stand with Penny Dreadful and Unrest as one of the stronger entries. It’s an enticing chestnut. April 16, 2008 “The
Abandoned” Review. © Copyright
2008 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
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