Marie, a film producer, returns to her native Russia to find her birth parents. She quickly learns they are dead, and she has inherited their long-empty farmhouse. At the farm, she meets Nicolai, who claims to be her twin brother. Events take a terrifying turn when the two spot a pair of ghastly doppelgangers and the house itself seems to propel them toward a fate they should have met 40 years earlier.
Through the murk and gloom of The Abandoned; a mystery emerges: Why didn't this go straight to DVD?
– A.O. Scott,
New York Times,
26 Feb 2007
rotten:
Perhaps the worst offense of The Abandoned, however, is that so little effort is made by the screenwriters to make any 'sense' of it all.
– Erin Meister,
Boston Globe,
26 Feb 2007
rotten:
The relatively tame horrors on display here may disappoint fans of the director's gut-spelunking short Aftermath, which made him an underground hero on the abra-cadaver circuit.
– Jim Ridley,
Village Voice,
27 Feb 2007
rotten:
The movie sinks so deep into deathly atmosphere that there's no life to it.
– Owen Gleiberman,
Entertainment Weekly,
28 Feb 2007
fresh:
Director Nacho Cerda succeeds in pushing the haunted-house movie into an abstract realm where the past and present fold into each other.