Bad horror can be fun because it is often silly, or transcends good taste. More than any other genre, it has the potential to find itself in camp territory (in the classic Sontag definition of the word). Alas, the new haunted house film Abandoned is not just bad. It’s worse than that: it’s mediocre. Aggressively, relentlessly, mind-numbingly mediocre. Every scare is timid and all the performances are safe, as if director Spencer Squier thinks the genre is beneath him. His film is meant as an allegory, a common trope among modern horror, but the message is lost because all the characters make decisions that bear no semblance to ordinary human behavior.
It takes less than a minute for screenwriters Erik Patterson and Jessica Scott to diminish our expectations. The cliches are immediate: Emma Roberts and John Gallagher Jr. play Sara and Alex, a young couple with a crying baby who are looking to buy a new home in the countryside. A realtor explains the low price is due to a murder in the house – we hear horrifying screaming in the brief, flashback prologue – and of course they sign anyway. Except for a creepy neighbor (Michael Shannon), Sara and Alex are totally isolated. Alex works as a vet, and there are long periods where Sara is alone with a baby to whom she feels little attachment. Creepy things and noises start to happen, as they must, and the movie takes its time revealing the overarching metaphor for her terror.
Creaky houses, crying children, and absent spouses are reliable genre staples for a reason. But those elements are bland by themselves, and filmmakers need some spin or formal inventiveness to make them resonate. Abandoned has absolutely nothing like that. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Squier to suggest he might have some fresh take on the material, but this film would have been forgettable when the genre was in its infancy. Roberts certainly does not help matters, since she cannot sell her depression or unease with the child. It is a wooden, creaky performance, to the point you can sense her waiting for her cues for each jump scare (not that they land with much shock). Somehow, Squier also manages to squander Shannon, one of the best working actors today, a fact which should permanently put him in director jail.
When a movie is this forgettable, you have to find pleasure somewhere. My suspension of disbelief was nonexistent and remained that way, so as each scene unfolded in the exact way I expected, I amused myself with plot questions Abandoned makes no attempt to answer.
Some of those questions: after Sara and Alex move in, they find locked windows and rooms they didn’t know about. Why didn’t they have a complete walkthrough with their realtor, or have a home inspection? How do Sara and Alex have zero support from friends or family? If Alex knows his wife suffers from postpartum depression, why would he leave her alone with a baby she functionally cannot love for hours at a time? The only answer is “the movie requires it,” which is depressing enough as it is, but then Abandoned opts for a wholly unearned, regressive ending that robs Sara of whatever little agency Roberts managed to scrounge.
There is potential in the idea of young homeowners buying a home with a sordid history, particularly with interest rates and real estate prices the way they currently are. Maybe the screenwriters could have talked to my dear friends Danielle and Ben, who recently bought the house that inspired the film The Exorcist. But doing that would require some curiosity about how people actually think, something that eludes everyone involved in this tedious bore.
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