Abandoned Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

Abandoned Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson September 28, 2022

Any time a young couple is considering a new home and their baby wails ceaselessly while they're inside of it, it's likely best to back out. That should be the advice Sara (Emma Roberts) and her husband Alex Davis (John Gallagher Jr.) heed when they visit an old house out in the country. When they're inside what they expect to be their baby's room, the toddler Liam cries incessantly. The Davis' real estate agent Cindy (Kate Arrington) is desperate to get the house sold since it's languished on the market for years without any buyers. Sara wants to know the reason. Cindy says it's due to "an incident" that occurred in the house forty years earlier. Alex would prefer she don't elaborate but Sara insists on knowing the full details. Cindy states that a young woman committed suicide after murdering her infant and father. She hands Sara an envelope with the investigative report, which Sara will unseal later.

Alex and Sara are formerly urban dwellers who wanted to escape the bustling city for a quieter life. She is on maternity leave from her job as a preschool teacher. He is a licensed veterinarian who takes a job on a pig farm owned by Harrington (Paul Dillon), a local farmer. When the couple are getting ready to unpack, an unexpected visitor comes through the door in the upstairs bedroom. He claims he knocked downstairs but the Davis' didn't hear him. Chris Renner (Michael Shannon), the stranger, has brought over beer as sort of a housewarming gift. He lives next door and says it's basically custom for neighbors to wander inside others' homes. Oddly, Alex and Sara don't comment to each other about the peculiarity of Chris's actions.

It seems Alex is away working on the farm a lot so Sara looks after Liam for much of the time. He loves sucking on his blue pacifier and playing with his toy truck. Sara also plays him a music box that opens up with a ballerina inside. But gradually, these objects seem to disappear. More disturbing to Sara are the sounds of children giggling behind an old wardrobe. She also hears the voice of a woman screaming. When Sara is in the kitchen with Liam late one night, she sees a little girl outside the window. A ghost? This isn't a new homeowner's ideal experience. Sara anticipated a quiet life on the farm but she keeps hearing ghosts and seeing their visages.

First-time director Spencer Squire said in an interview with Rob Jarosinski on the podcast Alternate Ending that he originally conceived Erik Patterson and Jessica Scott's screenplay to center on Sara's postpartum depression. The film deals in part with Sara's mental health troubles but Squire articulates in the same interview that "the powers that be" effectively took over the picture during post-production and transformed it into a traditional haunted house story. I don't take issue with that, per say, but rather with the fact that the resulting film exercises most of the haunted house/horror thriller's clichés. While there aren't many jump scares, the sound design relies on creaky doors, for instance, a little too often. Also, the kids' laughter behind the vintage armoire is stolen directly from the "clap game" in James Wan's The Conjuring (2013). Abandoned also shares with this modern horror classic a weak male protagonist. Alex Davis reminds me a lot of Roger Perron (Ron Livingston) from The Conjuring in the sense that they're both underused. I thought it was a cop-out on Alex's part that instead of truly trying to help his wife, he hires Dr. Carver (Paul Schneider), a creepy psychiatrist, to put Sara on anti-psychotic drugs.

But Abandoned at least remains watchable because it asks the audience: Are all of Sara's audio-visual perceptions just delusions or does this old house have some spirits inhabiting it? Squire builds some nice momentum editing wise when he cuts from the strange goings-on within the house to the pig litter where equally unusually things occur to the father and his herd. The movie's saving grace is Michael Shannon, an excellent actor who's also one of the most underrated. Shannon only appears in a handful of scenes but makes the very most of them as a middle-aged man with PTSD symptoms stemming from an awful childhood. At times, Sara connects more with Chris than she does with her own husband. One of the film's best scenes features the two of them on the couch with Chris holding Liam. It's a wonderful moment because they each can relate to the other's mental health struggles without directly saying what they are.

Abandoned Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Vertical Entertainment's recent release of Abandoned comes on this MPEG-4 AVC-encoded BD-25. The movie appears in its originally projected aspect ratio of 2.39:1. Corey C. Waters's cinematography is one of Abandoned's core strengths and it mostly shines on this transfer. But you'll notice video noise and ringing along the walls in Screenshot #18. Much of the film takes place at night. When filming occurs in day scenes, they're primarily interiors. Waters depends on natural light filtering through windows to illuminate some of the darkness. The opening scene, a prologue set forty years in the past, resembles a recycled theatrical print with scratches and film artifacts. Those blemishes reappear over the end credits. This was the filmmakers' intention so don't think this is a bad DVD transfer. Vertical has encoded the feature at a mean video bitrate of 24474 kbps.

Vertical has provided ten chapters for the 102-minute feature.

Abandoned Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Vertical has supplied a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 Surround (3488 kbps, 24-bit) and a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Stereo downmix (2013 kbps, 24-bit). Spoken words are clearly enunciated and always intelligible. The 5.1 mix can best be described as "direction specific." Early scenes amply demonstrate the distinctness of certain sounds. For example, baby Liam is crying off-screen on the SR channel. In other scene, Alex speaks to his infant son off-screen on the SL channel. A glass-encased candle later shatters on the floor, which is heard on SL. Children's footsteps are heard moving from SL to SR. There's also some loud thumping in the faint background. The movie's opening scenes feature crickets and birds chirping on the satellite speakers. The sounds of pigs briefly grunting and squealing are also heard on the surrounds. Flies buzz along the front speakers. Composer Michelle Osis's eerie score often plays fortissimo on the fronts and rears. Three or four ballads are played on a turntable in the house. The diegetic sound is filtered through the fronts.

Vertical's optional English SDH are complete and accurate.

Abandoned Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Most unfortunately, there are absolutely no extras.

Abandoned Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Abandoned exhausts nearly every haunted house horror trope that I was surprised a séance wasn't conducted or a priest brought in to perform an exorcism! Characters' motivations are sometimes lacking in the script, which has some plot holes. Still, I find the movie's switching from an omniscient view of the action to an occasional subjective POV to be fascinating. Michael Shannon's performance saves the film from being just a forgettable, run-of-the-mill haunted house thriller. I look forward to seeing more of Spencer Squire's work as a director, especially when he has editorial control and final cut. Vertical Entertainment delivers a solid HD transfer and a spacious sound track in lossless 5.1 and 2.0. Bonus materials are zilch. I'm giving Abandoned a SLIGHT PASS.