"The Abandoned" is all style but no substance, a great looking horror film with a needlessly cryptic story and virtually no character development. The filmmakers must have studied every haunted house movie ever made, because it looks and feels exactly the way a haunted house movie is supposed to look and feel. The hallways are dark. The walls are chipped, dirt coated, and shrouded with thick spider webs. The sounds of off-screen creaks and groans fill the air. The atmosphere was right, but it only amounted to something that was scary just for the sake of being scary; there was nothing much holding it all together, and what little there was completely lacked in value.

The main character is a woman named Marie (Anastasia Hille), an adopted Hollywood movie producer who was "born in Russia, raised in England, and divorced in America." She returns to her native Russia hoping to learn about her family heritage and find her true identity. All anyone seems to know for sure is that the mother was murdered back in 1966, when Marie was only an infant; there's absolutely no record of the father or any siblings. I find it baffling that a journey of self-discovery necessitates the character being a mystery to the audience. We do learn that she has a daughter named Emily; they have an argument over the phone. But that's all. Could nothing more have been revealed, namely her childhood experiences with her adoptive parents?

Marie meets with a mysterious man who gives her the deeds to her mother's secluded estate. She's clearly hesitant to be a part of this; her only intention was to learn about her mother. Still, she decides to give the estate a quick once over. That's pretty much when the scary scenes begin piling on top of one another; they begin when she's offered a ride by another mysterious man. They stop in the middle of the woods, just in time for the convenient horror movie cliches to mount. The fog rolls in. The moon is ominously bright. Frightening noises surround them. Not only is it impossible to believe that anyone would tolerate this level of tension, it's also impossible to believe that anyone in a horror movie could do the same. And yet Marie plunges right in, leaving the car (after her driver disappears) and walking to the house.

She enters to find that the house is completely dilapidated, as is expected in a haunted house movie. For a short while, nothing much happens, which I admit helps to build the suspense; she wanders from room to room (shouting the obligatory, "Hello? Are you there?," lines), with her flashlight serving as the only form of illumination. Then she sees a woman wandering the halls, a woman that's pale and sopping wet. We quickly discover that this woman is the spitting image of Marie (minus the eyes, which lack both irises and pupils). And that's when she runs. She leaves the house, runs through the forest, and falls into the river.

She then wakes up in the presence of the film's third mysterious man. His name is Nicolai (Karel Roden), and as it turns out, he's Marie's long lost twin brother. I truly disliked this character; he's stereotypically elusive, yet always seems to have an answer for everything. I suppose this would have worked had his circumstances not been so ridiculous. He claims that both he and Marie were lured back to this house, and that the forces at work are trying to keep them there forever. How he came to these conclusions is anyone's guess; he supposedly arrived at the house only a few days before Marie, which I don't think is nearly enough time to have the sinister plot figured out. Top that off with the fact that he, too, has a ghoulish clone wandering the house. He explains that whatever physically happens to the doppelganger will have the same effect on the real person. If he understood this, then I can't understand why he would shoot his own doppelganger in the leg.

The rest of the film works at pretty much the same level, with many more scenes of aimless hallway wandering, unexplained supernatural occurrences, and nonsensical plot twists. I distinctly remember a frenetic scene of the house restoring itself back to the way it looked in 1966 (surprisingly, it didn't look much better than it does in present day, save for working electricity). According to Answer Man Nicolai, the house is recreating the night of their mother's murder. He also says that this time, the murderer will succeed in killing them as infants. Am I honestly supposed to take such unfounded claims seriously, even if he's right? What about his stay at the House of Terror would lead him to this idea? He says that he saw the past while walking through a flooded underground tunnel, which would have been believable if only Marie had a similar experience. She didn't. All she experiences are more creepy noises.

It would be unfair of me to say that I knew what to expect from "The Abandoned." Nonetheless, I was definitely not expecting an extremely haphazard film, weak in story, characterization, and plot advancement. It's all made worse by completely unnecessary bookend narrations courtesy of Marie's daughter. Her understanding of her mother's search for her past is incredibly flimsy; Emily claims that she will never go searching for her past, like her mother did. Only in this kind of film can a character understand someone's fate without having been there to witness it. It simply made no sense. The same can be said for the film in general. Not too long ago I reviewed "The Messengers," another haunted house film that was too cliched to allow for a recommendation. While I stand by my review, I can also say this with absolute certainty: you'd be better off seeing that than "The Abandoned."

- Chris Pandolfi