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Iraq, the first Gulf War: American G.I. Miles (Jonathan Rosenthal) is
wounded during a heavy firefight, stumbles ... and when he gets up, he
finds himself not on the battlefield at all anymore, but in a cubic room
that's rather featureless and lacks windows and doors, and all he's left
to do is wonder how he got here - and treat his injury of course. Problem
is, every now and again, the room seems to rotate, and gravity doesn't
work within like it's supposed to. Miles tries to communicate with his
unknown captors, but gets no answer. He tries his satellite phone, but all
he can reach is a woman unknown to him, Damsey (Tamara Perry), who it
turns out is finding herself in the exact same predicament. The two of
them try to find out how he got there, but with everything they do find
out they find themselves more clueless, like the fact that she's not in
Iraq in the early 1990s but in the US 2020, and they are actually in the
very same cell, at the very same time that exists out of time, so when he
draws something onto the wall, she sees it being drawn in real life, and
vice versa. It's only eventually that they make some progress solving the
riddle of their predicament, but there's another problem, as every time
their cell revolves, the walls are closing in on our heroes, so time is of
the essence ... Of course, the basic concept of this movie
demands quite some suspension of disbelief, but The Abandon does
everything in its power to overpower its audience with a wild premise
(like the somewhat similar The Cube)
for a standard adventure pot but to earn its keep by properly integrating
it into the story and explore it from different sides, with its ultimate
solution making perfect narrative sense. And thanks to a very dynamic
direction and a heart-felt performance by Jonathan Rosenthal (who is in
almost every frame of the movie with no scene partners apart from the
beginning and ending) the film doesn't get boring for one minute despite
being set in just one featureless room. In all a pretty cool piece of
genre cinema for sure.
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