TIFF Report: The Abandoned Review

We begin in rural Russia, the mid sixties. A beaten up truck rumbles into a small viillage clearly out of control. The truck comes to an abrupt halt when it veers off the road and into a pole, inside the villagers find a young woman stabbed to death and two squalling new borns.

Jump ahead forty years. Marie has just arrived in Russia having lived her whole life in the UK and America with her adopted family, trying in vain to discover who her biological parents were. She had no luck until she received a call from a Russian agency. They discovered her after sorting through stale files and she stands to inherit a sizable farm property in the Russian countryside. Marie is uninterested in the real estate but, seeing the trip as a chance to discover her roots, she goes to explore the farm. Things, of course, go badly. She arrives in the dead of night only to be abandoned by her driver and while exploring the gloriously decayed homestead encounters something truly terrifying: her drowned doppelganger, an exact duplicate of herself with glazed over eyes and soaked with water. She flees the property only to be rescued by Nicholai, the twin brother she never knew she had who arrived on the farmstead a few days earlier, summoned by the same agency. Nicholai has also seen his double, this one bloodied and gutted, and discovered that it is impossible to leave the property. Some force is holding them there. “We are,” he explains, “being haunted by ourselves.”

As you can already see Cerda employs a great number of standard haunting cliches throughout The Abandoned. Many of the basic elements, on paper at least, appear overly familiar, but what sets Cerda apart from most film makers is the way he employs them. He is a master of manipulating expectations, both setting the audience up for scares that he teasingly refuses to deliver and smacking them with something truly unexpected. He also shows a rare gift for re-interpretation, for finding the core reasons why these elements became cliche in the first place - the things that make them work so well that they have been repeated constantly since first recognized - and tweaking them just enough to ensure that they become fresh again. And he brings enough of his own distinct flavor, elements not widely seen or used before such as the doppelganger ghosts, to keep his audience off balance, always uncertain as to what may be coming next.

The Abandoned also shows Cerda’s unusual approach to film as a whole, his belief that it should be, as far as is possible, a complete sensory experience. While his script is certainly tightly written Cerda is very committed to telling as much of his story through non-verbal means, whether that be through the images on screen, the physical performances from his very talented cast or, most obviously, the already mentioned completely pervasive sound design. This is an incredibly dense film sonically, both in terms of the score and the ambient sounds and Cerda plays that instrument masterfully, both embedding certain story elements and transitions entirely within the sound design and working it hard to provoke desired responses from his audience.

There are some flaws to the piece, perhaps a bit of a pacing issue in the early going and the over use of brother Nicholai as an exposition machine, always ready with an explanation when one is required to drive the story forward, but The Abandoned delivers exactly what it sets out to - a series of visceral, gut level scares with enough smarts to leave you thinking.