The Plot:

  An adopted woman, Marie (Anastasia Hille) returns to Russia, where she was orphaned as a child, looking for clues to her past life. Marie hires an investigator named Andrei Misharin to find out what happened to her parents. Misharin uncovers a piece of property on a small island in the middle of a mountain lake. The property is the ancestral family farm on which Marie’s parents lived and worked.
  Armed with tenuous nerves and her desire to discover the truth, Marie visits the property. Upon arriving she finds a man claiming to be her long lost brother, Nicolai (Karel Roden). The pair soon encounters wandering doubles of themselves that appear to have suffered significant trauma. Any attempt to escape seems to be thwarted by the farm itself as if Marie and Nicolai have unfinished business there.

The Point:

  It is rare that I am so let down by a movie that I literally think I deserve my time back; however, The Abandoned left me feeling exactly that way. I was attracted to this movie because it looked like a horror movie that used subtlety and the “based on a true story” aspect to tell a compelling tale. Instead I got painfully idiotic characters who never get redeemed, underplayed scenarios of tension, silly ‘monsters’ and a lot of dark shadows.
  After watching characters behave predictably in the most cliché’ of horror movie gags (sans blood and gore) I actually found myself hoping the monsters would kill these guys. In fact I was hoping they would make it slow and unsettling. But alas, I couldn’t even get the satisfaction of that.
  This movie gathered pace the way a shut in gathers newspapers and dirty diapers. It took this movie an hour and a half to say, “We have nothing to show you.” There, I just saved you the time. Save yourself the headache and the money.
   I gave The Abandoned the benefit of the doubt but this movie is as lame as Barbaro after the Preakness.