The Confines

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.

I love supernatural movies, suspense and thrillers movies. I think people forget that there are many more sections or categories to scary movies They're not all combined into one. I don't like the slasher movies for example.

My point is this movie is more of a suspense movie than anything else. So if you like suspense movies then this is the movie for you. When I looked through the reviews everybody's comments are about jumpscares and things of that nature but they're looking at it from a different perspective than what the movie is intended to be viewed as witch is as a suspense movie.

"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.

The scares are there, so are the intense moments, good chilling atmosphere, good execution and pretty much OK acting.

A normal horror, they didn't over stretch it, didn't over play it, they kept it simple and effective. Just don't expect to be blown away or even slightly impressed, the ending itself is very predictable. The Abandoned is a horror movie that some will see and they will most likely either quickly forget about it, or keep comparing it with so many other such productions before it.

All in all, an OK movie for a lonely late night.

Cheers!