Review: The Abandoned

Film: The Abandoned
Director: Nacho Cerda (The Machinist)
Reviewed By: Rom Servo

Set in present day Russia The Abandoned is the story of an american woman who returns in search of her true life story. She inherits the house where she was born and returns to salvage lost memories of her past. She meets up with her twin brother that she never knew existed and, apparently, their undead/tortured soul/zombie equivalents. When attacked, these tortured soul equivalents instantaneously reflect their inflicted wound onto the real them...rendering them ,well, unattackable. Eventually they start to figure out whats going on and, after a breif trip into the 70's, seemingly resolve the tragic conflict only to have a few more twists unravel.




So, in this film there is an obvious circular theme. Throughout there seem to be a few time warps and glitches in chronology. Like many other circular movies, the plot rises all the way to the very end avoiding any closure to the conflict. However, in this particular script that theme just doesn't work because in the actual storyline, there is in fact closure because the antagonist gets thier revenge and acomplishes all that the story is based around to begin with. Ultimately, most of the circularity is unexplainable and out of context. I wouldnt even call it circular, its more like a figure-eight with a couple peices taken out...never really forming any kind of plausible "restart".
The makeup and gore were great, the acting was great, the problem here lies within the writing, It seemed like there were either too many cooks in the kitchen, or the writer wanted to make a complicated movie that made you "think" but couldn't quite put their own peices together properly. Without coherent plot progression, the makeup and acting are at a tragic loss. They obviously spent alot of time and money making this movie, but it seems that no one ever stopped and said, "wait...uh...this part here cant possibly work because we already said this...".
All in all, reguardless of the quality aspects of this film, i give The Abandoned 1 blood drop.