If you’ve ever watched a haunted-house movie and thought, “This is fine, but what if it had fewer scares, more beige, and the emotional depth of a slightly damp paper towel?” then Abandoned is the film for you.
On the surface, it has all the right ingredients: bleak farmhouse, tragic backstory, postpartum depression, Michael Shannon lurking ominously. And somehow it still manages to be the cinematic equivalent of stale toast in a spooky plate. Yes, technically it’s horror. In the same way lukewarm water is technically a temperature.
Once Upon a Time in the Blandest Farmhouse in America
Sara (Emma Roberts) and Alex (John Gallagher Jr.) move into a big, isolated farmhouse with their baby, Liam. Sara is struggling with new motherhood; Alex is a well-meaning vet whose main job is to leave the house so Sara can suffer in peace. The realtor casually mentions that decades ago, a woman named Anna Solomon murdered her baby and father and then herself in this very home.
Normal people: “Ah, cool, we’re leaving.”
These people: “Wow, what a great bargain. We’ll take it.”
This is the first red flag: not in the story, but in the writing. The script keeps insisting this couple is desperate for a “fresh start,” but the house looks like it was painted in “trauma cream” and “ghost beige.” If Zillow had a filter for “guaranteed mental breakdown,” this place would be the banner ad.
Sara: Postpartum, Possessed, or Just Trapped in a Terrible Script?
Emma Roberts spends most of the movie looking exhausted, vacant, and vaguely allergic to her own child. To be fair, that part is actually pretty grounded—postpartum depression is a serious, underexplored topic in horror. Unfortunately, Abandoned uses it as a kind of narrative seasoning rather than the main dish.
Sara is afraid of being medicated because she wants to “feel” connected to Liam. She’s scared, resentful, and fragile. All great starting points. But instead of thoughtfully exploring that, the movie just tosses in some ghosts, a few visions, and calls it characterization.
Are her experiences supernatural? Are they mental illness? The film shrugs and says, “Whichever you find more convenient, thanks.” Ambiguity in horror can be powerful; here it just feels like indecision.
Michael Shannon, Wasted (Which Should Be a Crime)
Michael Shannon plays Chris, the neighbor who offers to help out around the property and whose main function is to stand around radiating traumatized energy. He’s Anna Solomon’s brother, raised in the house under their abusive father, Robert. He is, theoretically, a walking repository of lore, mystery, and menace.
In practice? He pops up to murmur cryptic warnings like “Don’t move the wardrobe” and to deliver a tragic monologue about abuse that feels like it fell out of a better movie and landed face-first in this one.
Michael Shannon is one of those actors who can make reading a grocery list frightening. Here, he’s given dialogue so limp the ghosts could use it as a bedsheet. It’s almost impressive to waste him this thoroughly. You could replace him with a scarecrow holding a sign that says “The Past Was Bad” and the story would change very little.
The Haunting: Where Tension Goes to Die
The house is haunted by the spirits of Anna, Robert, and a couple of ghostly boys, but you’d be forgiven for missing that amid all the limp execution.
We get:
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Generic creepy noises.
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Vanishing and reappearing belongings.
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Kids’ voices behind a blocked door.
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The occasional flicker of Anna or Robert floating around like they took a wrong turn from a Halloween store commercial.
There’s a bathtub scene where Sara is nearly drowned by Robert’s apparition that should be terrifying. Instead, it feels like the director whispered, “Do what The Conjuring did, but with less effort.”
The pacing is glacial. Long stretches of nothing are interrupted by small jump scares that would barely frighten a mildly alert housecat. The farmhouse could have been a character in itself—full of claustrophobic halls, layered secrets, and oppressive atmosphere. Instead, it’s just…a house. With squeaky boards and a ghost budget on minimum wage.
Therapy, But Make It Pointless
Alex, realizing that his wife is dissolving into paranoia and despair, calls a psychiatrist, Dr. Carver (Paul Schneider), who appears briefly to prescribe medication and say lines that sound like they were copied from a WebMD article about postpartum depression.
There is a potentially interesting narrative choice here: is the haunting a metaphor for Sara’s mental illness, or vice versa? Instead, the film plops both on the table and then forgets to pick one up. Dr. Carver’s presence doesn’t deepen the story or complicate it; it just allows the film to say, “See? We acknowledged mental health. We’re very responsible.”
Sara pretends to take her meds, continues seeing ghosts, and the therapy subplot pretty much evaporates. If you were hoping for an insightful commentary on how women are dismissed as “crazy” when they’re actually in danger, I regret to inform you this is not that movie. This is the “we wrote ‘depression’ on a napkin and taped it to the script” movie.
The Climax: Hatchets, Ghost Kids, and a Fade to Black Cop-Out
In the film’s big confrontation, Sara is lured by screams and phantom sounds, only to find her baby missing and the formerly blocked room wide open. Inside: all the vanished belongings, and two ghost boys—one holding Liam.
They accuse her of hurting her son. One lifts a hatchet. Sara screams. Fade to black.
This is the cinematic equivalent of your Wi-Fi cutting out right before the final reveal of a mystery show. Except in this case, the creative team chose to do that.
The next scene, it’s suddenly morning. Sara is miraculously fine. Liam is fine. Alex is fine. Chris is tossing baseballs with the baby in a pastoral little time jump. Sara sits on a swing, smiling, pregnant again, like the previous 90 minutes of ghost trauma was just an off-brand spa retreat.
Did the ghosts vanish? Did Sara conquer her demons? Was anything real? The movie’s answer appears to be: “Shh. Look, she’s happy now. Roll credits.”
It’s not ambiguous in a cool, Inland Empire way. It’s ambiguous in a “we didn’t know how to end this, so…vibes?” way.
Horror as Wallpaper
The biggest sin Abandoned commits is not that it’s bad—it’s that it’s boring and safe. It uses postpartum depression, family abuse, and infanticide as decorative motifs rather than themes. It refuses to pick a lane: haunted-house spooker, psychological breakdown drama, or family tragedy. Instead, it just skims all of them and hopes Emma Roberts looking stressed will glue it together.
There was real potential here:
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A mother who fears she might hurt her child.
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A house soaked in the trauma of another woman who actually did.
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A neighbor who grew up abused and never truly left.
Handled with care, this could have been an intense, unsettling look at inherited violence and the fragility of motherhood. Instead, it’s a sleepy mess where scary things happen because the runtime demands it, and then everyone is fine because the runtime is over.
Final Diagnosis: Right Title, Wrong Thing Abandoned
Calling this movie Abandoned is unintentionally accurate—somewhere along the way, they abandoned character development, tension, and coherent thematic follow-through.
If you’re a horror fan, you’ve seen every beat this movie offers, done better, sharper, and less lethargically elsewhere. If you’re here for Michael Shannon, you’ll get maybe ten minutes of him looking worried. If you’re here for Emma Roberts, you’ll mostly see her staring into the middle distance like she, too, is wondering why they made this.
Put it on if you need something spooky-adjacent to fold laundry to. Just don’t expect it to haunt you afterward. Frankly, the only truly haunting question is how a movie about postpartum depression, ghost children, and murderous family history manages to be this aggressively forgettable.
