Existential thrills

>> The Abandoned is a horror
flick with uncommon style and class

by MALCOLM FRASER

When a film begins with a long list of production entities from multiple countries, you never know quite what you’re getting into, but it’s rarely an existential horror thriller like The Abandoned.

Maria (Anastasia Hille) is a Russian-born American who visits her homeland in a mid-life effort to get in touch with her roots. Adopted as a child, she knows nothing about her birth parents, so she hitches a bumpy ride out to the remote rural cottage where she was born. Inevitably, spooky stuff starts to happen immediately. The house is full of peeling paint, decapitated doll heads and other signifiers of creepiness, but Hille, with typical horror-film logic, presses on in her efforts. Eventually, Nicolai (Karel Roden), a tormented man claiming to be her twin brother, turns up, and the spookiness is ratcheted up several notches as they try to find out the grim truths of their early childhood.

The Abandoned is clearly and unapologetically a straight-ahead horror film, but it has a unique style that sets it apart from its generic cousins in Hollywood. Spanish director Nacho Cerdà, making his feature debut, scrupulously avoids the clichéd horror pacing that makes many modern scare flicks so predictable and boring: the absence of that dulling knowledge of exactly what’s going to happen and when makes the film, not surprisingly, a lot scarier.

This unpredictability extends to all aspects of the film, from the excellent cinematography of Xavi Giminez (who also shot the equally creepy The Machinist, among many other films), to the atmospheric score by Montreal composer David Kristian.

The script, which Cerdà co-wrote with Richard Stanley and Montreal filmmaker Karim Hussain (La Belle bête), goes into some deep existential territory, with Hille and Roden unable to escape their childhood home and forced to face down their parents’ ghosts and their own undead doppelgangers. But Cerdà seems more interested in keeping the scares coming and doesn’t really flesh out the themes. Some viewers who get drawn in by the sophisticated Euro-style of the film may feel a little let down when it degenerates into scare-a-minute mode, but that’s perfectly OK if what you’re looking for is a well-done screamfest with more class than the genre typically allows.

The Abandoned plays at the Cinéma du Parc
May 11–12 and 25–26 at midnight. Karim
Hussain will be present for the first two
screenings and David Kristian will be on
hand for the third and fourth.

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