Abandoned is a movie I thought I liked at first because it has a good actress at its heart and it seems to know how to present suspenseful moments. But those moments all seem to be identical and they go nowhere over and over again until I realized I was watching Monotone: The Movie.

Emma Roberts plays a new mother who moves into a huge new house in the middle of nowhere. She has some level of postpartum depression and she’s hearing and seeing things… babies crying in the walls, a mysterious man, someone under the bed, etc.

I won’t go so far as to say nothing happens in this movie… but nothing happens in this movie a lot. It’s a constant state of the camera focusing on some random bit or bob while haunting monotonous music plays to convince you something spooky is happening. But almost none of these desperate attempts at being creepy amount to anything. It just becomes walls-to-wall noise disguised as creepiness.

I won’t deny sometimes the creepiness worked though… it’s just that there’s only so many times you can pull the same trick before you realize the movie has nothing to say. Only so many times a musical sting can inform you to be scared or how often they can focus on something irrelevant while ponderous music plays.

Yeah, this movie goes nowhere for a very long time and then it ends. I’ve seen worse haunted house flicks but I’ve not seen one with this amount of uneventful build-up.

Score: 64