DVD: The Abandoned

While it makes a change to see a horror story heroine who’s not a glamorous starlet that’s about all that’s worth noting about this routine ghost story.

Haggard British actress Anastasia Hille, whose career has rarely gone beyond bit parts on TV shows like Red Dwarf and Silent Witness, plays an adopted woman looking to find out where she comes from. After many years she receives information and travels to an isolated home in the Russian (actually Bulgarian) wilderness. Once there she encounters a ghostly doppelganger and, by apparent coincidence, a twin brother (Karl Roden from Mr Bean’s Holiday) she never knew she had. There are family secrets and supernatural twists following these encounters and the story meanders along in a familiar fashion.

Telling a ghost story with only two key characters is both ambitious and budget friendly, but the characters and story just can’t stop your interest waning. What Lies Beneath is a much better example of this style of film.

Occasionally engaging but mostly dull, The Abandoned is one of the least interesting films from Spain’s prolific Filmax, makers of the enjoyable The Nun and Romasanta: The Werewolf Hunt among many others.      Richard Hawes

.

Buy it here, if you must.