Mark Reviews Movies: ABANDONED (2022)

Abandoned, Vertical Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 16, 2022

Abandoned tries to be and be about so many things that the movie never clarifies what it's actually trying to do. Here, we get a ghost story about a haunted farmhouse, a mystery about a potential intruder playing mind games with our protagonist, a narrative that revolves around a certainly unreliable perspective, and a study of postpartum depression. If one had to guess, Erik Patterson and Jessica Scott's screenplays cares most about that last element, which only makes everything surrounding it feel disconnected and mildly exploitative.

The sense of mystery and foreboding piles up quickly in director Spencer Squire's debut feature. Sara (Emma Roberts) and Alex (John Gallagher Jr.), a married couple with a new baby, are about to buy a house out in the country. City living has become too much for Alex, a veterinarian whose work has him traveling to the countryside, and supposedly for Sara, too, although she doesn't seem too thrilled about change. Indeed, she doesn't appear thrilled, happy, or even content about anything, especially how her infant son keeps crying as she tries to console him.

To be clear, this isn't an effective movie on any of the levels it's attempting to operate—mainly because it is trying to operate on so many levels and in so many modes. There is, though, some painful honesty to be found along the way, in moments and scenes such as the way, during that introductory scene, Sara looks at her son and holds back frustration at her belief in her failure. Roberts is quite good at communicating those silent doubts, fears, and irritations. If not for the fact that the character's growing sense of panic is connected to so many other things in this story, her performance also provides a believable feeling of that quiet, internal pain escalating and becoming external.

The burdens of mystery and plotting put upon Sara and her struggle start even before we meet her. A prologue, which hears cries of pain and sounds of violence from outside the house, establishes a double murder and suicide that took place at the farm some 40 years prior. A backstory-revealing real estate agent (played by Kate Arrington) explains the basics: After giving birth, a teenage girl killed her baby and her father, before taking her own life. Despite this awful history, the couple don't pass up on the house, because Sara doesn't mind "a little haunting."

"Little," of course, turns out to be an understatement. Soon enough, Sara, who is regularly left alone with the baby while Alex travels around the area looking for clients, starts hearing things, seeing visions of the dead, losing various items and valuables, and being pummeled by both deathly odors and swarms of flies. Squire plays up the horror element of this, obviously, and in some generically predictable ways. Sara is startled by her own reflection in the window and, later, the girl from a photo left in the house staring at her, among other fake, imagined, or uncertain visions or figures who pop into frame with a shriek of a musical sting.

It's not just the apparent supernatural that may or may not be at play here. There's Alex and his mounting despair with what's happening to his family, and the way the movie follows him on his job—tending to the dirty and bloody work of discovering the origin of and dealing with a disease among a litter of piglets—suggests some narrative or thematic significance. When Sara discovers rotting animal parts under the couch, we might suspect the former.

In case the possible ghosts and suspicious husband aren't enough, we also meet the couple's neighbor Renner (Michael Shannon), who knows a bit—and then a lot—more about the house's grisly past. A key revelation about his own past seems to clear up every single mystery (although Sara somehow doesn't make the obvious connection to what she has been experiencing). Then again, that possible answer is so simple and self-evident that it's impossible to determine if the movie's apparent ignorance of how much it seems to give away is accidental—just bad writing—or intentional—just another red herring among the many others.

All of this is frustrating, not only because the game-playing is so transparent, but also because there is a real, grounded story about Sara's feelings and psychological state to explore within this story. In the end, Abandoned might actually be about that element of this tale, if in a roundabout and manipulative way. On the other hand, the movie messes with our perception and understanding so many times that it's difficult to determine what that final point is.

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