When the driver disappears into the night, Marie makes her way into the house by herself, which is exceedingly creaky and dark, as reportedly no one has visited it since her mother's death 40 years ago. Exploring the house with a flashlight, Marie is terrified when she meets a ghost who looks like her (except the ghost has all-white eyeballs). Marie runs into the woods, where she stumbles into a river and loses consciousness.

Things only get worse when Marie wakes up, apparently saved by Nicolai (KAREL RODEN), who claims to be her twin brother, also summoned to the house by the same sort of notice she received. After many hours facing down their matching ghosts (they each have one), the siblings decide that the house itself means to keep them there. Nicolai believes they must now die as they were "supposed to," when they were infants.

This has to do with their father's efforts to kill them 40 years ago, and their mother's valiant efforts to rescue them, despite the fact that she had been stabbed repeatedly in her bed. Together and apart, Marie and Nicolai try to escape, blasting at the ghosts with a shotgun and clambering through the house in search of clues. Each foray into the woods leads them back to the house.

For Nicolai and Marie, this is a fundamental dilemma. Both have arrived at this house believing they have been bequeathed property, that is, a link to a past they didn't quite know they had. Though the house itself is pretty regular (creaky floorboards, banging doors, spider webs in every corner), it does raise questions concerning identity and identifications. "I know who I am," insists Marie. "Oh no," says Nicolai, "You have no idea who you really are."

To be fair, Marie begins the film under duress. She arrives in Russia after receiving a notice concerning the house, but a phone call to her daughter back in California is jarring. Emily (who remains unseen) says her boyfriend is staying over, then, when Marie reveals her upset, hangs up. Alone in a strange country, Marie presses forward, hoping to discover something about her mother (murdered when Marie and Nicolai were infants) and so, perhaps, herself.

Her first surprise is the existence of her brother. As you've seen in the film's opening sequence, set in 1966, their mother suffered a gruesome, bloody death, driving her truck into a neighbor's yard before she died of stab wounds inflicted by her husband, her two tiny babies wailing in the passenger seat even as she stopped breathing. The cut to "40 years later" doesn't explain how Marie ended up in the U.S. or Nicolai in Russia, but that's probably the least of what's left out of their story. Marie learns of the house through the exceptionally sinister notary Andrei (Valentin Ganev), then hires a local truck driver, Anatoliy (Carlos Reig-Plaza), to take her on a day-long journey to the building, located in an area the driver calls "the island," in deep woods and surrounded by a river, so it's only accessible by a single bridge.

Arriving at the site at last, Anatoliy promptly abandons Marie, leaving her fearful in the truck cab and promising to check that the house is "safe." He never comes back, and eventually, Marie is knocking around the house on her own, her flashlight creating just enough light that you know she's not seeing everything she needs to see. Handheld camera shots indicate her shakiness as she explores, and her panic when she first stumbles on the white-eyed ghost.

While her ghost is wet and bedraggled, an apparent drowning victim, Nicolai's is bloody and missing chunks of himself. In fact, Nicolai saves Marie from drowning, for as she runs headlong into the night and falls down a hill into the river, where, just before the screen fades to subjective black, the bubbles and swirling water suggesting that Marie has drowned. Her subsequent discovery that she has a brother leads to their brief but very intense affiliation. Nicolai asserts, "The house wants us back." While this has something to do with their evil father wanting his "family" back together, such villainy only makes him unlike them -- and so, not posing the daunting sort of philosophical problem that the ghosts do.

On one level, dad's desire is Haunted House 101: he inspires or is produced by the bad place, that then, as in "The Shining," exacts revenge on ignorant interlopers. On another level, the "us" remains in flux. At one point, as she tries desperately to elude her ghost, Marie passes a dresser where, as the lingering camera ensures you notice, there sit a couple of Russian nesting dolls. While this most obviously alludes to the usual layers of appearances and deceits that fill up horror movies where the villain must be detected or caught, it also suggests the movie's central conceit, that no identity is fixed. Within the next minute, this idea is made particularly concrete, as Marie's ghost presses her up against the wall and kisses her, not a little voraciously, on the mouth.

The image is weird in any number of ways, not least because the effect of the "suckage" is Marie's own resemblance to the ghost: her eyes roll back in her head and her face turns extra pale. Whether or not his means the buss is expressing some other, nested self inside the divorcee, or whether it's a sign of repressed desire remains unknown. Still, the kiss does demonstrate the ghost is very, very bad. Haunting yourself is one thing. Kissing yourself, that's a whole other set of problems. "The Abandoned" rates as a 2 out of 10. (C Fuchs)