The Abandoned is a great film, with horror around the movie.
A Russian peasant family is sitting down to dinner when a run-down, overheating truck comes to a halt in the front yard. The father opens the door to find a now dead woman, obviously murdered, and two crying infants in the seat next to her.
Fast forward 40 years. We meet Marie Jones who has been summoned back to Russia by a notary who claims to have found her long dead parents and the home they once owned: the Kardinovsky Farm. As she mounts the steps to his office, she runs into someone, but brushes it off.
After meeting with the notary, who explains he found no other living heirs, she sets out to visit and claim her parent's home. She arrives at the house where her mother died and is "attacked" by a now very old mother who, in Russian, insists that she not go to the Kardinovsky Farm. They're interrupted by Anitoly, her guide, the only person willing to venture to the farm at night.
The farm sits on the "island", a small parcel of land surrounded by the river and only accessible by a bridge. After hours of driving they cross the bridge and stop just a few yards from the house. Anitoly tells Marie to stay put while he makes sure there are no animals between them and the house.
Marie waits, and then sees what appears to be Anitoly ahead of her, but when she leaves the truck, she finds herself alone. Within minutes the truck dies, leaving the forest quiet.
With no one around, and no where else to go, she enters the old house armed only with a flashlight and begins to investigate. While exploring the ground floor she hears a bang and a child wailing from upstairs and rushes up as quickly as possible to see... nothing. She enters the nearest room, a nursery, and sees, out of the corner of her eye, a woman walking past the door.
When she runs into the hallway she sees the same blonde woman turn into another room and she follows only to scream as she comes face to face with her dead self who appears to be very real and soaked to the bone. She runs out the door in time to see the truck (and presumably Anitoly) leave. In a panic she chases him and falls down a hill and into the river where, since she can't swim, she begins to drown.
She wakes up in a much warmer and brighter lit room in the house. There is a man (Nikolai) rifling through her wallet. Marie smacks him across the face with a log, then flees the room.
He chases her and explains that he is her brother and that he too was summoned by the notary. She is of course skeptical, as the notary had told her she had no brothers or sisters, but when he takes her upstairs and shows her their cribs she realizes he is telling the truth.
She tells him what she saw and he explains, that seeing your double shows you the way in which you will die.
Very quickly they meet Nikolai's ghost (a bloody, ravaged body) and they both realize they have to get out of the house and off the island. As they get ready to flee Nikolai falls through a hole in the floor and vanishes leaving Marie alone. She returns upstairs, determined to find anything to explain what is happening. Upstairs, in her parents room, she witnesses some of the events of the past as she watches her father stab her mother to death on their bed. Screaming, she turns to find her double behind her, yet again. This time it catches her in the babies' room and seems to suck out part of her life, leaving her gasping and disoriented. She flees the house.
There is a boat on one side of the river, and she takes it to the other side, leaving the island, and her dead self (watching from the shore), behind her. Unfortunately, it's too late, and as she runs through the forest, she finds herself before the house again.
This time when she enters, she finds the dining room is suddenly... clean and neat, as it must have been decades before. At the table, looking morosely at a birthday cake, is an injured Nikolai. He didn't die, but merely fell into the basement through the floor. He explains to Marie that he's figured out what is going on: they were never meant to have left the house in the first place. They were supposed to have died with their mother all those years ago and now, on the eve of their birthday, the house has called them back to fulfill their destinies at midnight.
When the clock strikes midnight, the entire house returns to the state it was in 1966, and they hear their father enter the house. Marie tries to intercept, hoping to change the past, but Nikolai intervenes and tells her that it's already happened and that the only way to survive would be to get away from there, in the past, where the house can't touch them. But when they try, they get separated. Marie ends up in the back of the truck as her father drives away with the infants (herself and Nikolai), whereas Nikolai sees the form of his long lost love, Natalie.
Her father stops at the barn, leaving one baby in a pig's pen to feed the baby to the boars, while he tries to drown the other. Neither he nor his wife (who he had thought was dead) see Marie. Her dying mother shoots her father in the head and grabs both babies, fleeing to the truck. Meanwhile Nikolai turns to see his lover is now actually his father and then is attacked by wild boars, fulfilling his destiny.
Marie finds her father's now desiccated body in the farm, and is then pushed back into a pseudo-past where she realizes her father and the notary are one and the same. He's come back from the dead to lure his children to the hell he had created. She flees his office in the present and runs right into her past self as she comes up the steps, and continues to flee into the sunlight until she finds herself right back in the house, this time between the past the present, where the apparition of her father explains to her that he's always loved his children, and his wife, and couldn't let them leave him. She runs from him, down the hall and finds Nikolai's body, being eaten by the boars. As they tear off his nose and parts of his stomach, she vomits and falls against the wall. It's only when his dead self comes after her that she flees out to the truck parked out front and drives away.
Her father's voice comes over the radio, telling her to come back and join the family he has created, and then promises to take her daughter, Emily (who is in the States) but it's too late. The bridge that brought her there has been destroyed, and she plunges into the lake, drowning, and fulfilling her destiny.
The film ends with her daughter (who we now realize is the narrator) explaining that she knew in her heart her mother would never return. It's been months since she left for Russia and in all this time she's never had the desire to know what happened to her, or her parents, thus breaking the cycle and leaving her... abandoned. This is not bad for the second horror movie arrived in the Philippines this 2009. Compared to "Molly Hartley", this movie is a little bit interesting.
In theatres January 21, 2009
My Rating: 3.5 stars
Ginban Kaleidoscope is written by Rei Kaibara and illustrated by Hiro Suzuhira. The manga adaptation is also written by Rei Kaibara and illustrated by Jun Hasegawa. An anime adaptation of the first arc of the novels, aired weekly on TV Tokyo from October 8, 2005 to December 24, 2005. This animated series is about the 16 years old Japanese figure skater known for her sharp tongue, Ms. Tazusa Sakurano who considers herself to be worth $10 billion in beauty and Pete Pumps, the Canadian ghost .
