Being a Melanie Lynskey fan, I just had to see
Abandon, even though it was in the theaters for only about two days, and there were few positive reviews for it. What a bad movie! It was just like my creative writing students' stories--great images, great portraits, and a bad twist, with no plot or character development. The mystery is there, but we don't care about the mystery. There are so many missing pieces that the main mystery is not compelling. I don't want to know what happened to this missing person. Here are all the missing pieces (when in a well-crafted story, there should be only two or three): Is the missing guy dead or alive? Is Katie hallucinating? Is the cop really a cop? Is the cop obsessed with Katie? Did the librarian assistant do something to Katie? Did Embry (the missing guy) do something to Katie's boy friend?
Why does Katie have feelings for the cop? Why do Katie's friends keep making cameos? Obviously some of those questions were meant to be red herrings, but with so many red herrings, I didn't even know what we were supposed to be looking for. And none of the relationships in the film were fleshed out at all. When characters end up having sex, you just look at the screen and say, "What the fuck?!" Most upsetting is the minimal screen time Melanie Lynskey gets... and in such a dumb role, too. Well, at least you get to
see her--that's the one redeeming part of the film.
--A.Y.