Abandoned 2022 Ending Explained-Is The House Haunted, The Pigs, And The Delusions Of Motherhood

Emma Roberts plays a new mother who has either postpartum psychosis or might actually be haunted in this creepy thriller.

Parenthood, in general, is tricky. Particularly for women, it’s hard to balance being a mother and an individual. We feel pulled from place to place without feeling like we are doing anything well. Additionally, our bodies undergo massive changes that can wreak havoc on our emotions. It’s easy to write off concerns and worries as simply that of an exhausted mind. First-time director Spencer Squire uses that timely premise and crafts something unexpected and disturbing in Abandoned.

Sara(Roberts) and Alex(John Gallagher Jr., The Belko Experiment) move to a small remote town into an old farmhouse with their baby Liam. Since Liam’s birth, Sara has struggled with postpartum issues, and Alex mistakenly believes isolation is the best course of action. Unfortunately, like The Yellow Wallpaper, Alex is ill-equipped and not inclined to help his wife properly. Making matters worse, shortly after touring the house, they learn that the gorgeous home has a tragic past. The more time Sara spends alone in the house, the more she becomes convinced something is haunting her. Is it the ghosts of the past or something even more dangerous? Might it all be in her head? Here’s everything you need to know about the ending of Abandoned.

The Solomons previously owned their home. Anna Solomon killed her father and her daughter before committing suicide inside the house. The opening sequence shows the outside of the house forty years ago, and we hear Anna begs her father to spare a child. She says, “you promised I could keep this one.” This scene makes more sense contextually at the end of Abandoned. They move in despite Sara’s misgivings, and it isn’t long before she begins to regret her decision. There is a strange room with a locked door and a massive wardrobe blocking it, and many of the windows are nailed shut. An intrusive and worrisome neighbor Renner, perenially talented Michael Shannon, enters their house without permission claiming that it’s common in the country.

The first night living in the house, Sara starts hearing children laughing and decides to read Solomon’s full story. She looks at the crime scene photos and realizes Anna looks like her. Things move around the house, photos are cut up, and her beloved music box is broken. Sara finds a pile of dirty diapers under the couch and begins to see Robert everywhere. He chases her through the house and tries to drown her in the bathtub. She also has visions of him raping his daughter.

Liam is a fussy baby, and his constant crying makes an already on-edge Sara incredibly anxious. She has had to stop taking her psychiatric medication to breastfeed Liam, so we aren’t entirely sure if everything she sees and feels is real. Sara is a ball of nerves who also loses track of time, leaving Liam in danger on occasion. Alex found Liam just before he fell down the stairs and was appalled that Sara almost let him get hurt, but doesn’t realize that although Sara does have problems, she might be dealing with something paranormal.

Sara has had trouble connecting with Liam. She thinks she doesn’t feel about him the way a “mother” should. This very common concern leads her to believe something is wrong with her. Alex is not any help as he is a large animal veterinarian who is away a lot, building clients and tending to farm animals. Finally, in desperation, Alex calls a psychiatrist who prescribes more medication which Sara lies about taking.

The ending of Abandoned

When Alex gets called to treat an animal, Sara convinces him she will be fine alone with Liam, and he leaves. Shortly after, she sees two Solomon sons, who tell her Liam belongs to them now. They claim Sara is a danger to her son, and they need to protect him from her. One of the boys holds a hatchet and swings it at her as the other holds Liam. The scene cuts abruptly, and we next see Sara holding Liam and saying, “he is mine.” The implication is since she embraced him as her child, her postpartum is over.

It is at this point that everything we have seen so far twists. Sara destroyed her own photo because she no longer sees herself as a working woman. Liam’s crying is because Sara has either hurt or neglected him and does not realize it. The demons that she thinks are haunting her house are internal. Although terrible things happened in this house, there are no ghosts. No boys live in the hidden room, and nothing haunts her. The boys could not possibly be Anna’s children because they would have been born forty or more years ago and would not still be children. She conjured them from Renner’s stories and the information she learned about the Solomons.

Sara faces her fears and accepts that what she is seeing is not real. After a harrowing night defending herself from her own mind, she accepts reality, and when Alex returns, she appears more lucid than she has in the entire film. The final scene shows her and Alex happy and content. She no longer wears the rubber band on her wrist, and the whole family looks healthy. Liam has grown, and as the camera pans down, we see Sara is pregnant again. However, just before her pregnancy is revealed, Sara’s face looks troubled. Maybe she isn’t as healthy as she appears, or perhaps she is worried she will have postpartum psychosis again.

Given the ambiguous way the film cuts to black as Sara is defending her baby, everything we see at the very end may be a delusion. Sara never got well, and Alex came home to find her and Liam. She could be locked up in an institution or heavily medicated and unaware of what happened to her. The happy ending could be a way for her to cope with what really happened. This is particularly possible if Liam was injured or killed during her hallucination of Robert and the boys.

Was the house haunted?

The house was not haunted by anything more than Sara’s personal demons. She doubts herself as a mother and a wife and has problems with breastfeeding, which is very common. Liam’s reluctance to breastfeed makes her insecure, coupled with her mental illness; she is vulnerable to hallucinations and self-doubt. Those things manifest as ghosts. The seeds were planted when she read about Anna and her family and strengthened by her anxiety and isolation. Sara is petite and blond, and after finding a picture of Robert and Anna, she realizes she looks just like her.

When they opened the locked door, they found the room where Anna was forced to live. Her delusions grew to include everything weird that happened. It was all part of her psychosis. Everything that happened, from the maggots in the milk to the missing or broken items, were things that Sara did herself but didn’t remember doing.

Sara is stressed out, and Alex is not particularly helpful. He constantly undermines her and belittles her concerns. For example, instead of understanding the importance of her breastfeeding, he thinks she is being cruel and stubborn. He is not a bad man, just a clueless one whose reluctance to see how badly Sara needs help endangers everyone. Hopefully, he will better support Sara with the next pregnancy.

Renner warns Sara not to continue poking around behind the wardrobe because some things should be left alone. He isn’t implying that people are living in the house. Instead, he is indicating that a terrible tragedy happened in this house to multiple children. Sometimes the past should be left in the past. Sara says as much in the beginning when she says we should look toward the future and move on from the past.

Who is Renner?

Their neighbor Renner is actually Andrew, who is a Solomon. When his sister Anna killed her daughter and father, Andrew was spared and went into foster care. He was just a baby at the time. Years later, he returned and moved into the house next door. He did not ever want to hurt Sara or Liam and only wanted to be close to his childhood home. Likely Renner suspected the farmhouse might have ghosts due to the number of people who died there.

The two boys Renner mentions and Sara sees in Abandoned are additional children Anna conceived after being raped by her father. They were forced to live in the locked room out of shame. The scene at the beginning was the night of the murder-suicide. Robert was probably the one who killed Anna’s daughter, and Anna killed her father and herself as a result.

What was up with the pigs in Abandoned?

A farmer brings Alex to his farm to tend to a litter of diseased pigs. Alex determines the pigs are sick because the sow made them ill, and they should all be put down. The cheapest but least humane way was euthanasia by a bolt gun. The more expensive way would be easier on the pigs, but the farmer rejects this plan. This entire plot thread showed that this rural community was pragmatic, leaning towards cruelty because they had to be. It is also interesting to note that the farmer initially blames the illness on the father and not the mother.

Although abandoned is a rather simplistic view of mental illness and postpartum depression, it is an entertaining enough chiller for a near Halloween weekend. Abandoned is streaming on Hulu right now.