The Confines

It reminded me of some good old-fashioned horror movies. This film relies more on suspense as opposed to cheap scares that I see in every horror film these days. Jason Patric gives an outstanding performance, and so does Louisa Krause although I was not familiar with her acting before this film. Mark Margolis is always a pleasure to watch even in his smaller roles. The location and setting are amazing, and the pacing and cinematography kept me at the edge of my seat. Personally I loved the ending but I always preferred films with good twists that keep me guessing.

9/10

Definitely recommend.

"The Abandoned" has a young troubled woman (Louisa Krause) working as a night patrol at a massive abandoned luxury apartment building in New York City. Training her on the job is a cynical longtime employee (Jason Patric), but what should be fresh on-the-job jitters becomes a living nightmare when she discovers something sinister lurking in the building.

Perhaps it's because I went into this film with relatively low expectations, but I found "The Abandoned" to really only be half-bad. Previous reviewers are astute in their observance of the film's atmosphere, which is laid on thick and is really the central reason that I stuck with the film from beginning to end. It's well-photographed and the sprawling Renaissance-meets-art deco interiors are profoundly creepy. The film is worth viewing for this reason alone, as it is truly engrossing on just a visual level.

The script is where this film is truly weakest, although this mostly lay in the hodgepodge resolution, which is where the film really begins to come apart at the seams. It is not necessarily as cliché-ridden as many have seemed to paint it to be, though it is most definitely clichéd. At times the film reminded me of 2011's "The Innkeepers" due to the sparse cast and nightshift setting, though a far less subtle version; at other times, it seems inspired by 1999's "House on Haunted Hill" remake. Louisa Krause and Jason Patric have great chemistry on screen here, and play off of one another quite well. Both provide solid performances that are better than the material demands.

Overall, "The Abandoned" is a middling supernatural horror film; it is far from revolutionary, and is at times frustrating in its employment of routine plot devices, but the synergy between Krause and Patric is great, and the film is at times legitimately creepy, even in its conventionality. On a visual and atmospheric level, it's fantastic, but, as I said, the script doesn't match up with the film's aesthetic strides. 5/10.

This murky little horror film involves a woman who may or may not be going out of her mind who gets a job as a security guard at a run down old apartment complex which has been long since abandoned. Her only company on the job is a fellow guard, cynical and disabled. The woman becomes convinced that a sinister presence lurks within the confines of the building and takes it upon herself to investigate...

As you'd guess from the premise, CONFINED is very much par for the course for this type of film-making. It feels a lot like GRAVE ENCOUNTERS and the like, albeit without the 'found footage' hook and shooting more traditionally instead. There's a lot of stuff with CCTV footage, which is quite neat, but more often than not the film descends into the usual wandering around in dimly lit corridor type scenarios.

The film lacks decent cast members; those present are okay, but hardly electrifying. Jason Patric (THE LOST BOYS) looks so unrecognisable that it took me half the film to realise who I was watching. And despite repeated efforts on the part of the director, CONFINED doesn't manage to be scary for a moment.

I been on a movie set like this in which a director was able to get access to a place were he can film his entire movie all at once in a few days or weeks. Sometimes the problem with that is that they try to stretch out something that cannot be stretched.

The first act is slow, and you can tell its slow because nothing happens that really drives the movie to go anywhere or get me interested at all (except for me thinking to myself "is that Jason Patrick?"). They could have used a better lead actress as well.

As the movie progressed, it keep looking like it was going to be promising, but they kept holding on to moment in the film for far too ling and you loose interest.

Overall this horror film was trying to be cleaver and imaginative, but mostly just lost me in boredom. Overall it was a good story that was just not implemented well enough.

This movie had all the parts it needed to be a great horror movie. A creepy situation, creepy location, good acting (Jason Patric), and part of a story.

They didn't do a good job though. It's like they were baking a cake, got all the ingredients out, and then just left it all on the counter in separate piles, tadah!!!

The story makes no sense at all. I think Louisa Krause is probably a decent actress, but was over acting all the time. All though I'm pretty sure that was due to the writing.

This would be a good movie to remake with all the same actors and the same place, but with someone that knows how to tell a story that makes sense.