Metacritic Film

Abandoned, The

Starring Anastasia Hille, Karel Roden, Valentin Ganev, Carlos Reig, and Paraskeva Djukelova

MPAA RATING: R for violence/gore, some disturbing images, nudity and language

Lionsgate / AfterDark Films
Foreign  |  Horror
96 minutes | Color
Spain
Released In Theaters February 23, 2007

An American woman searching for her birth parents learns she has inherited a house in the middle of a forest in a remote area of Russia. It is the house where she was born. Abandoned and uninhabited for 40 years, it stands in total disrepair and neglect. What she finds is more than an old house. She meets a mysterious man who claims to be her brother, a twin she never knew. Together they find that the house holds secrets to a past they don't remember, forced to relive a series of horrifying events and shocking murders that occurred just after they were born, in the place they were supposed to die. (Lionsgate)

WRITTEN BY
Nacho Cerdà
Karim Hussain
Richard Stanley

DIRECTED BY
Nacho Cerdà

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

42 / 100

Critic Reviews

75 TV Guide
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.
75 The Onion (A.V. Club)
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.
70 Variety
Minimally plotted but beautifully atmospheric nightmare.
40 The New York Times
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.
30 LA Weekly Jim Ridley
Cerda's striking creep-show atmospherics, desaturated palette and off-kilter editing rhythms are a style in search of a movie: The muddled "Twilight Zone" payoff here is hardly enough to justify a sluggish two-character round-robin of "Don't look in the basement!" The last thing a filmmaker named Nacho needs is more cheese.
30 Austin Chronicle
It's no "Dellamorte Dellamore," but neither is it "Uwe Boll," a smallish favor we should all be thankful for.
25 Boston Globe Erin Meister
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.
16 Entertainment Weekly
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.

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