The Abandoned follows a distressed police officer investigating a string of grisly murders at the hands of a mysterious killer who is sharpening his knives for the next target. The film is available to stream on Netflix.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Plot summary
On New Year’s Eve, a woman’s dead body dumped in a river stops Wu Chieh from committing suicide, as she has been wrecked by guilt over her husband killing himself out of depression.
She investigates the case with the new rookie Wei-shan, who is an academy topper but a bit of a klutz.
The corpse is examined and her ring finger, heart, and all her blood are missing.
When the police get an anonymous call tipping them off about the identity of the dead woman, the investigation moves forward and gets complicated.
All signs point to Lin Yu-sheng, who is linked to many migrant workers involved in this case.
He provides refuge and fake IDs to the migrant workers and is the ex-boyfriend of Waree — the dead woman.
However, as the inversions move further, the picture gets more convoluted and the stakes get even higher.
All this to a tense denouement where the real serial killer is exposed and dealt with before The Abandoned rolls the credits.
Ending explained:
A cop who can’t cope
Wu Chieh is the deputy captain who has recently lost her husband Yang Chen-kuo, to suicide.
She blames herself for his depression and for not knowing what he was truly going through.
She can’t cope with this reality and finds herself unable to part ways with the car inside which Yang shot himself to death.
One night, she parks the car near a river and goes to shoot herself to death in the same way.
She is stopped, however, when a group of youngsters pass through scared, having spotted a corpse dumped in the river.
She has a case, and therefore, a reason to live a bit longer.
At the end of The Abandoned, she does end up finding how to cope with the death of her beloved and move on from her past. She finally dumps the car as well.
Waree, Yu-sheng & Makong
Waree Napho was a Thai migrant worker living in Taiwan for the last six years, the past three years of which she has been missing.
She was in a relationship with Lin Yu-sheng, a delivery driver who also is an agent for the illegal migrant workers and provides them with places to stay, IDs, and help in finding work.
Due to the differences between them regarding marriage, Waree, and Lin Yu-sheng drifted apart and broke up.
She’s not been in contact with him for a while now. He’s been trying to find her to no avail.
She was seeing another man recently, Mankong, but as her younger sister later tells Yu-sheng, she still loved Yu-sheng.
The corpse that Wu Chieh found was of Waree, and Yu-sheng and Saipin eventually receive the tragic news.
Suspicions all around
A man from a public telephone informs the police that the corpse belongs to Waree, and later drops a box at the booth which contains handcuffs used to bind Waree before her death.
From the fingerprints on the box, it’s found out that they belong to Mankong.
Wu Chieh and the rookie cop Wei-shan are on the case and discover that all these people, along with another missing migrant worker, Yeti Ayuni, have a common link to Lin Yu-sheng.
He doesn’t cooperate at first but after learning of Waree’s death, arranges for Saipin’s return through his friend Huang Tung-chi.
Then he goes to confront Mankong, who was one of the people that Wu Chieh showed him the pictures of during the questioning.
He thinks he must be the killer but after hearing him, realizes he didn’t kill Waree.
Wu Chieh and Wei-shan also follow and give chase, as Mankong runs off for his life crying he didn’t murder Waree.
When he’s had enough of the distress and guilt, he snatches the gun from the officer and kills himself.
He did tell Yu-sheng beforehand that he dumped Waree’s corpse in the river at his boss’s orders, or else he risked losing his job.
Yu-sheng had done the same not very long ago. At the orders of the boss of the slaughterhouse, he had to bury the dead body of Yeti Ayuni.
The abandoned
This is because reporting her murder would have jeopardized the migrant workers’ jobs and livelihoods. Unfortunately, this tragic state of the migrants is what the serial killer had been exploiting confidently.
Yu-sheng digs out her body and shows it to Wu Chieh for examination, which is when she figures out the aforementioned reality of migrants that the killer exploits.
He knows how lonely and vulnerable the abandoned migrant workers are, especially the females in the community, who make for the perfect targets of his psychopathy.
His modus operandi also involves using his previous target’s phone to contact his new target, and then kidnapping and killing them.
The serial killer
His next target is Saipin, whom Wu Chieh, Yu-sheng, and Wei-shan trace down to the taxis she gets in; the same taxi that Huang Tung-chi drives.
However, upon deeper inspection, they find that it’s a different taxi that uses Tung-chi’s license plates. They track down the car and find that it belongs to Fan Chang-fu.
He’s the photographer that Yu-sheng and Tung-chi recently took Saipin to, in order to get her photographs for the IDs. He helps out Yu-sheng and the migrants by forging documents for them as well.
He kidnaps female migrant workers who have no friends and family — a case all too common in the country.
He then cuffs them to a wheelchair at the abandoned facility — his usual choice of captivity, and kills them with carbon monoxide poisoning. He then drains them of all the blood, before removing their left ring finger and heart.
It is revealed that he started doing this after his migrant wife left him, taking the money for herself and leaving only the ring at home.
Case closed
When they find his taxi, Fan Chang-fu happens to stop his other car just moments later. Yu-sheng manages to pin him down but he uses a knife to break away.
Wei-shan, running from the opposite side, tries to stop him and manages to do so long enough for Yu-sheng to pin him down properly.
In this short period, though, Chang-fu manages to stab Wei-shan in her heart. They get her admitted to a hospital before Chang-fu asks them to stop by at his studio.
He directs Yu-sheng upstairs, where the latter finds the portraits of all the victims sitting in the wheelchairs, cuffed and crying.
He also finds their hearts kept inside containers, including Waree’s. He’s driven mad and begins choking Chang-fu to death.
Wu Chieh has to shoot Yu-sheng in the leg to be able to stop him. She then goes to the abandoned facility where the killer has kept Saipin in captivity.
He tries to capture Wu Chieh with Saipin at the facility but she manages to shoot him down and then break the glass window that she uses to breathe in CO-free air of the outside, and help Saipin do it too.
The Abandoned ends with Saipin recovering at the hospital, where Yu-sheng visits her and hands her the remains of her sister.
Wu Chieh sits beside Wei-shan, who has also recovered nicely and enjoys video games sitting in her wheelchair.
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