In the world of horror if there is a family moving into a house that has a reasonable price range, it is guaranteed to have a seeded past and or be haunted. The cornerstone of this film trope is to watch how the horror seeps in and slowly begins the whittle down the groups trust and sanity until the family begins to break down. If a family arrives to this situation already dysfunctional and fractured, the audience loses half of the rising action of the film and where there could be likable characters that fall apart, they arrive unlikable. Abandoned hits the ground running with tiresome characters that only get more exhausting as the film slogs on.

Sarah (Emma Roberts) and Alex (John Gallagher Jr.) wanted a break from the city life following the birth of their son and they have found the perfect house in the country side. The move was for Sarah who has been experiencing a depression since the birth and this house should do the trick, but the house isn’t what they though it would be. It turns out there were murders and a suicide, one that included the death of a baby. Though this seemed like something they could overlook for the fresh starts, things begin to go missing and everything only get worse from there.

What sounds like a very typical start for a family being haunted, Abandoned wants to add the spice of not only a dysfunctional marriage to start but postpartum depression. A tall order for a classic horror trope but something that could be handled well in good hands, which is not the case here. From the introductions to our main characters it is clear that they doesn’t get along and Sarah is sick of her baby. So what character development can we develop beyond that? Not much as they just try to intensify those feelings as the house becomes more haunted but that doesn’t make the characters any more interesting.

In films like The Amityville Horror the hauntings and the previous tragedies often parallels the home occupants to set up the possibility of the horrors striking again creating tension. Abandoned on the other hand does nothing to connected the situation and just has a tragedy used to do weird reveals that hardly factor in to the general story and in the later half make bizarre story decisions. With the absolute mess they make of the haunting it is easy to question why this was a haunted house story at all, when they could have just made a thriller of a woman dealing with mental illness sparked by a house with a tragic backstory.

Everyone wants to create an original idea that that will be the start of a smart new take on a horror sub-genre but it takes the understanding of what made that sub-genre successful to begin with. It feels like Abandoned wanted to take the horror community by storm with a new take but failed on the first fundamental idea of the family haunting  film, we have to care about the family.

4 out of 10