The Abandoned

This Taiwanese police procedural is a dull, lifeless film that simply goes through the motions without reaching any discernible high points.

It begins with the usual hook for this genre: a serial killer makes life hard for a depressed detective, who has to come to terms with herself while chasing the madman with the help of her rookie colleague. That would be fine if the plot presented at least a few fresh ingredients throughout the runtime, but it just settles into a predictable rut and never manages to lift above it.

I can't quite say this is a terrible film since it is competently shot and acted well enough, I guess. But the writing is unexceptional, and even pretty weak at times, given that a few scenes come across as comical when they were obviously meant to be serious. Absolutely no surprises or interesting character work are at store for the viewer, and I believe that won't cut it for many genre fans.

It is available on Netflix for anyone interested, but I wouldn't recommend it.

I was expecting a decent crime thriller but instead I got me some incompetent and plain stupid police and some rather unlikeable victims' circle type characters. The whole plot rests on people acting stupid and impulsively. And in all honesty in real life they probably would not have caught the guy and got themselves killed one way or another by the way they're carrying on. I do love a vigilante type of cop but that's a whole genre and you gotta do it right. The traumatized cop is also a genre of its own, but this is not it.

Anyway, the killer bothered me too, I did not buy the motivation, his origin story, the reason he became unhinged. It doesn't seem strong enough. He also gets too many lucky breaks, or like I said, the guys in pursuit are just plain dumb exposing themselves like that. It's just unimaginative writing. The visuals are good enough, the acting is decent, we just needed better characters and story. Give this to the Scandinavians, they'll make a masterpiece of noir thriller. I mean they probably already made this movie.

A depressed policewoman (she is on the verge of suicide in the first shot of a film) investigates the murder of a young Thai woman whom she meets by chance. Other disappearances will follow. The bodies are mutilated. Is he a serial killer? She leads the investigation and manages to find out: it concerns a girl in an illegal situation in Taiwan; they arrive from Thailand. But some disappear and are found with missing organs.

Everything often takes place at night and often in the rain, in a dark, depressive atmosphere, very successful. Our investigator is not a superhero, and the Taiwanese police don't seem very efficient either. Janine Chun-Ning Chang carries the film and carries out the investigation with difficulty.

The film is a success in its genre. It maintains the viewer's attention until the culprit is identified and his confrontation with the policewoman.

They could have toned down the frequency of those flashbacks, because there were too many and they literally ruined the movie for me, they were so inconsistent and at times unnecessary too breaking the flow of the movie. But yeah you can give this a shot and you might even love this because they have created a good dark atmosphere around the plot which is really captivating and it compliments the story well. You may find the central reason of the plot (as to why the killer is killing) to be too silly but yeah the atmosphere that was created and the acting overshadows it. If you're looking for a decent serial killer mystery this is worth looking into.

Cha wu ci xin (The Abandoned) was one of the movies that I was waiting to watch. I had high expectations from this movie but my expectations did not match after watching the movie's ending. I can tell you that it is a really good movie until the ending of it. Janine Chang is a really good actress and I think that she should appear in TV Series and movies of the West. Nevertheless, I cannot say the same for Chloe Xiang because she is really overacting and it is obvious. The atmosphere of this movie is a bit depressive and if you are suicidal, you should stay away from this movie. I give 5 points out of 10 for this one because of it's ending. It could be much much better if the movie had a different ending and less emphasis on suicidal tendencies.