Featured Movies
Partners
Abandoned
An American film producer in Russia returns to the spooky old country house where her mother was murdered 40 years before. Spanish horror
Cashing in on the trend for cross-cultural chills in 2008 have been a slew of European releases with their eyes on the international market. Fragile was a scary but ultimately so-so version of The Others filmed in English on Jersey by Spaniards and starring Ally McBeal. The Backwoods, meanwhile, a soft Straw Dogs set in Spain, dribbled away the talents of Gary Oldman and Paddy Considine. Which is quite some feat. A Spanish, English and Bulgarian co-production set in Russia, The Abandoned shares with those films an eerie setting, haunting cinematography and a complete lack of original ideas. Dilapidated and rotting as if it has spent the last four decades underwater, film producer Marie Jones' (Hille) country pile is cut off from the world by forests of dense fog and ferns. We are told, somewhat tautologically, that a river surrounds the property in a circle. Now that is remote. It's a great venue for a ghost story, and Xavi Gim??nenz's cinematography matches his sterling work in Fragile, all verdant greens, morose greys and crane shots locating us in misty nowheres. The problem is, there's not really a story to tell, and every shot is pregnant with significance that never emerges. As Hille meets her long-lost twin brother Nicolai (Roden - Matt Damon's nemesis in The Bourne Supremacy and the clockwork Nazi in Hellboy), and they find themselves menaced by ghostly versions of themselves, the film goes a parsimonious 27 minutes before the first decent scare. The Abandoned is European - it's an art film, might be the filmmaker's response. But all complexity and ambiguity has been bleached out to the point of dullness, and Hille speaks in cliches that suggest a badly translated script. "The past is another country now, best forgotten. Just because you're through with your past, doesn't mean your past is ever really through with you," she intones, mangling lines from LP Hartley and The Shawshank Redemption. Do the filmmakers not realise that, in ghost stories, the apparitions are immeasurably more important than the places they occupy? Remember the bland Japanese starter home in The Grudge? No? Remember the horrific clicking she-demon stalking the stairs? Uh-huh. Besides, there's a remarkably easy way to solve the old haunting-yourself problem. Stop. Verdict Enervated by glitchy atmospherics but not much else, The Abandoned is all house and no haunting, so best leave alone. |
