"The Abandoned" has a young troubled woman (Louisa Krause) working as a night patrol at a massive abandoned luxury apartment building in New York City. Training her on the job is a cynical longtime employee (Jason Patric), but what should be fresh on-the-job jitters becomes a living nightmare when she discovers something sinister lurking in the building.
Perhaps it's because I went into this film with relatively low expectations, but I found "The Abandoned" to really only be half-bad. Previous reviewers are astute in their observance of the film's atmosphere, which is laid on thick and is really the central reason that I stuck with the film from beginning to end. It's well-photographed and the sprawling Renaissance-meets-art deco interiors are profoundly creepy. The film is worth viewing for this reason alone, as it is truly engrossing on just a visual level.
The script is where this film is truly weakest, although this mostly lay in the hodgepodge resolution, which is where the film really begins to come apart at the seams. It is not necessarily as cliché-ridden as many have seemed to paint it to be, though it is most definitely clichéd. At times the film reminded me of 2011's "The Innkeepers" due to the sparse cast and nightshift setting, though a far less subtle version; at other times, it seems inspired by 1999's "House on Haunted Hill" remake. Louisa Krause and Jason Patric have great chemistry on screen here, and play off of one another quite well. Both provide solid performances that are better than the material demands.
Overall, "The Abandoned" is a middling supernatural horror film; it is far from revolutionary, and is at times frustrating in its employment of routine plot devices, but the synergy between Krause and Patric is great, and the film is at times legitimately creepy, even in its conventionality. On a visual and atmospheric level, it's fantastic, but, as I said, the script doesn't match up with the film's aesthetic strides. 5/10.
