The Abandoned

A woman (Anastasia Hille) returns to the remote, abandoned Russian farm where she was born (having been adopted in infancy as an orphan and raised in England) to learn what she can about the biological parents she never knew. Or something like that. A story that, in surer hands, might conceivably have made a decent half-hour episode of The Twilight Zone 40 years ago is padded out to the point of absurdity in the script by Karim Hussain, Richard Stanley and director Nacho Cerdà. The result is inert and inept, so disjointed and nonsensical that you wonder if Cerdà and his editor didn’t simply shoot a lot of murky, under-lit shots and forget what order they came in, stitching them together more or less at random in the cutting room. Karel Roden, Valentin Ganev and Carlos Reig comprise the rest of the cast.