Movie Review: The Abandoned

There was a horror film fest last year that I missed because I went to my parents' for Thanksgiving. "The Abandoned" was one of the favorites from that festival so it's getting it's own release.

It takes place in Russia and feels Russian, but the characters speak non-dubbed English most of the time so I'm not sure who made it. It FEELS Russian though. The story and the cinematography aren't something you see Americans doing.

This is also the only movie I've seen that uses doppelgangers as the spectre of choice. Doppelgangers are spirits that look like you. Normally I read about doppelgangers as warnings. The story that springs to mind is about a soldier in WWII leading his men down a road. He saw himself up the road waving at him and told his men to get back and get off the road. Some vehicles then passed them and were caught in an ambush.

In this story, however, the doppelgangers tell of an unavoidable future. They're both the Corsican Brothers and Cassandra rolled into one.

The story starts 40 years ago when a woman shows up at some Soviet house in some POS truck. When someone opens the door she's dead and her twins are in the seat next to her. Jump forward to now. A woman finds out that she has inherited some land in Russia. She goes to Russia and is driven to the land in what observant movie goers will notice as the same truck from 40 years ago. Spooky stuff starts happening almost immediately. Spooky stuff in the woods chases her into the spooky house where she meets a drowned version of herself walking the halls. Back out into the woods she chases the truck as it leaves and falls into the river.
She wakes up back in the house with the twin brother she never knew about. She spends much of the rest of the movie freaking out over little things and over absolutely nothing.
Together she and her brother explore the island that they were born on, find they can't escape, find out what happened to their family, and on midnight of their birthday the house rolls back to how it was 40 years ago and they relive the night their father flipped out.

All in all a good horror movie.