The Abandoned (2006)

Best movie of this year hands down!

You won't be disappointed!

Touches You

Strong and Moving!

Or, perhaps another title for this could have been 'The Perils of Marie Jones'. Anastasia Hille plays Jones, who inherits the haunted-est haunted house you ever saw. Director and co-writer Nacho Cerda is as persuasive as he can be in convincing us as to the sinister aspects of this house, which has a kind of sentience. And through its dusty, slimy corridors and broken windows and floorboards Marie travels, occasionally coming across blank-eyed wraiths.I can only think of 2014 film 'Across the River' that creates and spins such a deliciously sinister web of shabby, grotesque dilapidation - a study of decay. Here, the story-line is secondary to mood, with vague suppositions from Marie's twin Nicolai (Karel Roden) about the building recreating doppelgangers to recreate scenes of murder the house has previously borne witness to. This is suggested in the film's opening scene involving two abandoned babies found by a Russian peasant family.Perhaps it is best not to think too much about any structured storyline, but sit back and drink in the atmosphere, the sparse landscape, the vast open spaces drenched in moistened fog, the cadaverous spectres, the possessive nature of the building ... and other such delights. There is a very satisfying moment towards the end in which a seemingly irrelevant collision brings things full circle.Welcome to the family.

Its been a long time since i was at least a little touched by a modern horror film. I kind of watched this mostly because i had nothing left to watch that night. Without spoiling anything I can just say that I was blown away with this ghastly movie. I see it in the same way as Lucio Fulci's masterpiece The Beyond. Yes, it got plot holes and everything is not spelled out for you. Its like a surreal nightmare. Actually it shares a lot with The Beyond. An eerie house, zombie-like apparitions,the same sense of dread.Gory deaths and so on. It might not be for the ADHD generation (You got Transformers!)or people who wants answers for everything.But for true genre fans its a true gem. Not to be missed!

A film producer who was adopted as a baby and sent to America, returns to her native Russia and the family farm, where she was born. Strange things begin to happen including the disappearance of her guide, the manifestation of ghosts, an apparition of herself, and the appearance of another man who may have an explanation, or even a connection......This film had a lot of potential, showing the flip side of someone's life, if they hadn't had something happen to them at the last second.You know those movies where someone is going to get shot, and at the last minute they are saved by someone else? This is what would happen if that someone else wasn't there.It sounds very promising, and in the hands of an able director, the story would have been well told, but instead,me get this borefest that has a decent twist to it, but doesn't know how to deal with it.So we are left to the obvious brother and sister walking around the house, walking into zombified versions of each other, and then get treated to a reconstruction of the two as babies, with a little bit of Hannibal thrown in for good measure.And that's the film, the two leads have no chemistry together, and Roden looks like he's been forced at gunpoint to do this.I wouldn't bother, it sounded good, but self heating cans of coffee did too, and look how many people regret having them.

In 1966, somewhere in Russia, a wounded woman drives a truck to an isolated farm with two babies. Forty years later, the film producer Marie Jones (Anastasia Hille) leaves her daughter in California and travels back to her home land in the wilderness of Russia. Marie is one of the children and had received a phone call from the notary public Andrei Misharin (Valentin Ganev) that had told her where the farm of her family is. Marie arrives in the abandoned house and meets the stranger Nicolai (Karel Roden) that tells her that he had also received a call from Misharin and he is her twin brother. Weird things happen in the house and Marie and Nicolai are haunted by eerie ghosts of themselves. Further, they find that they are trapped in the house and can not leave the place."The Abandoned" is a frightening and creepy film of ghosts, with a nightmarish atmosphere but a dull story. The unknown Anastasia Hille has great performance and the cinematography is very dark; but the story is very confused and predictable. Cristopher Smith used in "Triangle" (2009) a similar idea of people trapped in a location that can never leave the cycle. My vote is five.Title (Brazil): "Abandonados" ("Abandoned")