"The Abandoned" Strangely Suitable Soviet-Style Screamer

[Ed Augusts]

This movie is not a horror film at all, despite 90 minutes of nearly
unremitting horror... it is a sad tale about those who are lonely,
displaced, and confused, in modern Russia. "The Abandoned" (2007), is
a jolt in the head to anyone who has deep feelings of any kind about
Russia, whether negative feelings about our old Cold War adversary, or
warm and regretful sentiments about "Mother Russia", whose sons
defeated the Nazis, but where the start of Westernization was stalled
from within and starved from without. It moves a person to comprehend
that Russia is a ruined farmhouse where evils took place decades
earlier, but where sinister forces are coming together, in the
present, (in the person -- in this movie -- of the officious and
ultimately evil lawyer or estate agent), to punish anyone who happened
to escape from that former evil with their lives. .

Anastasia Hille plays an unhappy, no... mortally anguished... second-
rate American film producer who flies to Russia, not to collect the
inheritance of her family's home deep in the woods, but to try to find
out more about her mother, who abandoned her as a newborn, just shy of
42 years earlier. In a prologue we see the truck bearing two
squalling infants and their dying mother, roll up to a remote Russian
farmhouse. With the unhappy faces of a family of Russian forest
people, Spanish director Nacho Cerda starts this bleak "return to
Russia".

Other reviewers complain the home needs new cabinets from Ikea. They
likely have never seen much of rural Russia, decimated and humbled
from the days of Joseph Stalin's starvation tactics, and then the
Blitzkrieg of W.W.II. In 1966, when the action begins, it was Soviet
Russia. Forty-two years later, when the orphans return, it is Putin's
Russia... but in the Russian soul, very little has changed. The
farmer still has a few beets and cabbages, a crust of break, perhaps a
farm animal or two. "The Abandoned" shows a house that is exactly
right for having been emptied of human inhabitants four decades
earlier. The forest has intruded. The winter winds and snows have come
and gone a number of times, leaving much of the place in a shambles.
The atmosphere is just right The film seems to me to be about a
Russia which has fallen to its knees of its own pompous and over-
reaching weight (the downfall of the Soviety Union), but then, aided
by no postwar Marshall Plan, helped by no Congressional billions, this
Russia has been abandoned by the West, abandoned by its own leaders,
abandoned from the forward-moving tide of history. The Mongol Hordes
who swept through this landscape five hundred years, a thousand years,
earlier, can be imagined as coming back any day now into the vaccuum
of power that's there today.

The westerner, Hille, the "American film producer" (though no details
are given and she doesn't seem to be known, by sight at the airport or
in the city), is the token Russian-American, the woman who was born
Russian but now returns as an American, and thus is singled out for
punishment by the mystical forces of a rural, ancient, bloody Russia.
Wait and see if this is not so as the movie wends onward!

This movie is a jolt in the head to anyone who has deep feelings of
any kind about Russia, whether negative feelings about our old Cold
War adversary, or warm and regretful sentiments about "Mother Russia",
whose sons defeated the Nazis. This film grows in malignant
atmospheric intensity, just as traveling from a 3rd rate Russian
provincial capital into a dark, menacing forest, like we think the
Black Forest of Germany must have been like in the Middle Ages, but
parts of Russia, like the Ural Mountains, and those parts that border
on Bulgaria and Romania, still are, today. Just when you feel how sad
and lonely the deep forests of Russia are, with lightning glowing in
the distant clouds, you are propelled into a haunted nemesis: a
rambling, ramshackle old mansion on a nameless island, set deep in the
trees. One becomes more alert and edgy by the moment as our heroine
is delivered, as if, 'to order', to be an unofficial and long awaited
sacrifice.

Hille is a perfect foil for all this horrific Russian atmosphere. She
is no longer a young woman, but she is not elderly, by a long
stretch. But beauty and that ease and peace which are exuded by
beauty no longer reposes within her or graces her outward appearance.
In an early scene in which she speaks with her daughter in America,
she portrays for us the bleakest, least-effective, most "frustrated
middle-aged parent" of a teenage child, which adds to the spirit of
grim despair which the movie starts with and then plows a deeper and
deeper furrow into our soil with, as the movie goes on.

Her brother, who has a Russian accent, and must have stayed in Russia
for the past four decades, is ineffective in helping Hille out in her
lost and confused moments of abandonment at her newly inherited forest
home. He is the Russian who is good-hearted but ineffective. When he
shoots at the Doppelganger who looks like him, the shot ricochets and
hits him in the thigh. Neither the Russian-American OR the Russian are
likely to escape the ghosts from the past, or the creaky old house
they find themselves in.

Stupid things happen. The man has heard strange noises from a
subterranean channel, a place down in the sub-basement... so,
naturally, he and his sister go down there and delve further into the
muck... Unbelievable things happen. The woman rows a boat to the
mainland, and walks for miles and miles...surely she's going to be
okay, now... No! Sh finds herself ---you know where!

Please do NOT read the following paragraph if you would rather not be
told some important elements about the movie's climactic scenes.

The two infants were originally saved by their mother: The father was
drowning one, and the other one was going to be eaten by hogs when she
saved them. Near the end of "The Abandoned", notice that the brother
was eaten by hogs and his sister was drowned in the swollen river.
Thus, they came back to meet the very fate which their mother's
sacrifice had saved them from, four decades earlier. But a good
question might be: WHY did the mother, who saved her babies from
their murderous father, NOT save her grown children from the ghost of
the same man? Why was it allowed for this child-murderer to triumph
in the end? Was she, as a ghost, now incapable or unwilling? Had her
moral scruples vanished? Consider the moment when she stands naked,
and her son walks up and touches her, a lingering moment before the
pigs come in and start devouring him. It is possible that there were
considerations about the father of these children which the movie did
not go into. What starts as a mystery ends as a mystery. Even if
there were issues of, let's say, paternity --who WAS the real father
of these kids?-- that caused the man to go insane and try to kill the
babies, WHY would his wish to see them die come true four decades
later?

For this and the fact the evil here is circular, as in certain South
Asian religions in which we cannot easily escape our karma but are
doomed to live it, and be either punished or rewarded by it, the evil
"coming down from above", so to speak, I feel the movie is almost too
bleak to watch. It can only be seen satisfactorily as a film triumph
of symbolic horror about a horrific Russia, a Russia that for the past
hundred years, has had its roots going down into a hellish mix of the
politics of blood and the false nirvana of vodka which barely
disguises the sacrifice of its stubborn and proud people by internal
and external forces. That the returning successful Russian-American is
tortured and tormented for 90 minutes should not surprise anyone who
knows Russia.

Best, --------Ed
www.edaugusts.com
http://twitter.com/edaugusts