Spain, United Kingdom, Bulgaria · 2006
Rated R · 1h 39m
Director Nacho Cerdà
Starring Anastasia Hille, Karel Roden, Valentin Ganev, Paraskeva Djukelova
Genre Horror, Thriller
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Marie, an expatriate film producer returns to her family farm in Russia to find her brother Nikolai waiting for her along, with zombies. The pair desperately try to escape but supernatural forces prevent them from doing so unless they confront their violent and tragic past.
With a "Lost"-meets-"The Haunting" plot and a handful of convoluted thematic twists involving family, history, murder, and death, The Abandoned limps into a nebulous kind of horror netherworld, peppered with painfully long tension-building sequences and unimaginative dialogue.
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
After a while, Mr. Cerdà exhausts his repertory of spooky effects -- too many dark hallways and illogical, foreboding point-of-view shots -- and you begin to hunger for exposition, always a bad sign in a horror film. Even worse is that, by the time the explanations arrive, you no longer care.
Minimally plotted but beautifully atmospheric nightmare.
By the film's downbeat climax, Cerda's dread of death and uncertainty about digging too deeply into what's better left buried have become palpable, and The Abandoned lingers beneath the skin as any decent horror movie should.
Austin Chronicle by Marc Savlov
It's no "Dellamorte Dellamore," but neither is it "Uwe Boll," a smallish favor we should all be thankful for.
Entertainment Weekly by Owen Gleiberman
The gimmick in The Abandoned is that people battle their zombie doubles, whom they can't kill, since they'd be killing themselves. But the movie sinks so deep into deathly atmosphere that there's no life to it.
The Abandoned is a rare horror film that moves from the real world into a kind of psychic space, and slowly suffocates its characters inside their own heads.
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