PLOT SUMMARY: Following the birth of their son, Sara and Alex move into a new house where a violent incident had taken place.
It's one thing to watch a movie where characters are unaware that they have moved into a haunted house. It is another when characters purposely move into a house where murders have taken place and joke about not caring if they are haunted.
It sort of makes you not want to sympathize with them when they are faced with a bizarre incident.
Abandoned does deal with some serious topics though, like abuse and postpartum depression but then it mingles in a hard-to-follow mystery and inserts a character, the husband in this case, that is uncaring of his wife's struggles.
What you end up seeing is just another movie with horror tropes and little else.
ABANDONED Movie Plot
The movie begins by showing the exterior of a house at night. Screams are heard. There is a gunshot.
Cut to the present and we see Sara and Alex roaming around the house and considering purchasing it.
Sara is holding her baby, Liam, and looks exhausted. Alex is talking to the realtor and is making his excitement obvious to her.
Sara asks the obvious question to the realtor: how come no one has bought this house in so many years.
Reluctantly, the realtor reveals that a murder had taken place in the house. She remarks that the couple now probably doesn't want to buy the house.
Sara takes pauses but pretty much says that she wants the house. There is a swing on the tree outside after all. And who cares about a little haunting anyway? Not her, that's for sure.
Alex asks her if she's sure. Of course,close-up Sara is sure.
She roams about with Liam and sits on the swing. There is a creak and a close up of the branches is seen. But fear not, it may be an old swing but it can carry a lot of weight.
Meanwhile, Alex mopes about his life after the baby. The realtor keeps pushing the pen on his face, clearly not interested in his sob story. But Alex signs only after he talks about how hard it has been for him lately since he has to deal with Sara's mood swings and an infant.
Finally, the papers are signed, and the realtor handed Sara an envelope with a report detailing the incident that had taken place in the house.
The couple moves in and sets up the house. Alex puts the crib in their bedroom even though Sara wants Liam to have his own room so that she can catch a break. Alex seems persistent and eventually gets his say.
Sara is putting away her stuff when she tries to open a door to a room and finds it locked. Alex uses his tools to open the door and jokes about them buying a house without inspecting all rooms.
Considering the room is kind of next to their bedroom, it is strange that they didn't notice the room sooner.
At night, Sara hears the sounds of kids and thinks it is Liam at first. But her baby is quietly sleeping for a change. She finds the voices coming from behind the wardrobe.
Sara is unable to push the wardrobe aside, which isn't a surprise considering she barely eats anything. She makes pastas and whatnot but doesn't put a single forkful into her mouth.
She takes a peek behind the wardrobe and sees a door to what she assumes must open to a crawlspace.
Sara narrates the incident the next morning to Alex who is in a hurry to go to a farm. He's a vet or something that is not important to the story. It is only important that he stays out of the house for long periods of time so that he doesn’t have to help his depressed wife with the baby.
Sara wears just this one white dress throughout the movie. She even sleeps in it. The only change in her attire is a pink ribbon she wears on her hair. The pink ribbon apparently doesn’t belong to her but she doesn't take a second even to take it and put it on.
Alex doesn't seem to notice that Sara isn’t changing her clothes. She probably doesn't even bathe. We see her in the tub only toward the end of the movie.
Sara tries to bond with her baby by playing music from her music box. Liam doesn’t care much for it. She reluctantly plays records for him and Liam finally settles down.
The couple also have a neighbor who keeps popping into their house without an invitation. He calls himself Renner and says he's a handyman. But his spaced out looks seems to suggest he knows the secrets of the house but has no intention of revealing anything to the couple. Not until the end, anyway.
Sara pushes Liam's crib into the other room. That night she hears the sounds of children again. But again finds out nothing. She finds a photo later on of the man who used to live in the house before and his daughter. The photo is clearly torn off.
Unable to understand what is going on, Sara opens the report the realtor gave her and sees crime scene photos. There is a moth or a fat fly on the woman's face who is lying in a pool of blood. She also sees photos of the dead bodies of the man and the girl.
Soon, Sara is haunted by the moths who circle around the porch lights and make it go off. Sara turns towards the window and sees the ghost of the little girl who was killed.
There's more crying and this time it is Liam.
Liam keeps crying throughout the movie, while Alex spends time in farms discussing different ways to kill off sick pigs.
Sara roams around like a zombie in the same white dress. At one point she's sitting on the sofa, staring at the wall when she smells something bad.
No, it's not Liam's diaper. She moves the sofa and sees a bunch of old, smelly diapers with flies circling it. She hears a knock on the door and quickly conceals the diapers again. Not her problem.
Renner clearly doesn’t smell the diapers. Sara either left Liam's diapers there without realizing it, or, as it is revealed later, the intruders left it for her as a prank.
Nevertheless, the diapers are never picked up yet the stench diminishes. No one smells the diapers anymore.
One night, Sara is tending to Liam when she sees the ghosts in the room.
It is the ghosts of Anna and Robert. Sara sees Robert abusing Anna and is so shocked that she puts the baby down and walks towards them.
Of course the gate to the stairs needs hardly a push from a baby to open. Liam pushes it open when Alex chooses that moment to wake up, open the door, and grab the baby just in time.
The ghosts vanish and Sara heads toward Liam but Alex slams the door on her face. He doesn't want any explanation nor does he evenin consider that all this might be an accident. He doesn’t even want to know why the gate was easily opened.
In that one minute, he has already decided that Sara intended to toss Liam down the stairs.
The next morning he tells Sara she needs to see a psychiatrist and that he has already called the doctor. He refuses to give her Liam.
He doesn’t notice that Sara is wearing the same dress four days in a row or that she looks like she hasn't slept or eaten in days. If he was worried about her depressed state, maybe he could have tried spending more time at home and helping with the baby? Or gotten her help much sooner?
Sara agrees to see the doctor for the sake of her baby. The doctor lets her hold Liam while Alex heads out to off some pigs in a cruel way as per the farmer's request.
The doctor barely does anything but point out that Sara is under a lot of stress and that he has noticed that she has a rubberband around her wrist and knows she has been snapping it every time she is under stress. We do see Sara snapping it several times during the movie. It is a wonder she has no marks around her wrist.
He wants to put her on pills but Sara refuses because then she won't be able to feed her baby, her only connection with Liam. The doctor points out that she already threw out the milk before but Sara failed to mention to her husband that the milk had maggots in them which is why she threw it.
Now ideally she should have shown the bottles to her husband before tossing it away considering he was always suspecting her for something or the other.
Just then Renner comes in and clearly he's more sympathetic than anyone else in the movie.
ABANDONED Ending Explained with Spoilers
Sara asks about Renner's connection to the family living before. He was the son who was never spoken about.
After the incident, he was put in the system and given a new name. All this info is given by the realtor and confirmed by Renner.
So that's that.
But is it?
There's another twist coming right up. Turns out the voices Sara has been hearing coming from the crawlspace are from feral boys living there who are as judgmental as they come. They think Sara is a terrible mother and so she shouldn't have charge of the baby.
Seriously, the couple made a terrible job of inspecting the house before buying it. There were kids living there and no one noticed?
Sara tells them to give her back her baby.
They threaten her with an axe and Sara tells them the baby is hers.
Cuts to the next scene where Alex returns and Sara has pancakes ready at the breakfast table.
Okay, so now it seems the boys and every ghost Sara has encountered were hallucinations?
At first, it seemed that the boys may have been troubling Sara and causing her to believe she was going nuts.
The last scene shows that Sara had been influenced by the photos she saw and may have cooked up the whole thing in her mind.
Once she cries out that the baby is hers, she has accepted her role as her mother finally, even though her depression is far from being cured.
She and Alex move on with their lives and in the end, we see that Liam has grown up a bit and the swing on the tree is still strong enough to hold Liam, Alex, and a very pregnant Sara.
Sara does look worried and it is insinuated that she may be battling depression once again due to her pregnancy.
The title suggests that Sara may be facing abandonment issues because Alex keeps his distance from her due to his work commitments. And she did need him when Liam came along.
At this point, Sara was probably hoping for a little haunting, as she says nonchalantly in the beginning, just so she has some company when Alex is away.
The movie doesn't really clarify in any scene to show whether Sara was hallucinating everything or not so we must make our own deductions.
Scare Scale:
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