Abandoned: The Woman in the Decaying House Review
Director: Katia Lund
Date Created: 2025-08-16 01:37
4
Abandoned: The Woman in the Decaying House Review: Directed by Katia Lund, and created by Gil Ribeiro, Marcia Vinci, and Margarida Ribeiro, this Prime Video documentary series A Mulher da Casa Abandonada runs for three episodes of around 35 minutes each. It’s based on journalist Chico Felitti’s podcast, and it begins in the most unassuming way: a run-down house, a woman with a face painted white, and a neighbourhood that has learned to live with the odd sight. But as the episodes unfold, the real story emerges, and it is nothing like the harmless curiosity it first seems.
Abandoned: The Woman in the Decaying House Review
Exteriors show that the house is in disrepair, with paint flaking off, grimy walls, and darkened windows. Its occupant, a wizened old woman who never ventures outdoors, seems so delicate and perhaps a little strange. You almost find yourself willing to envision her as a wretched spinster frozen in her memories when the early scenes of the show almost lead you down that path. That impression does not last long. The story that begins with wonder soon coheres into something richer, something that lingers.
The woman under the painted mask is more than an innocent character. As the documentary Abandoned: The Woman in the Decaying House unspools her history, it reveals decades of in-house cruelty. It’s not cruel in the swift, violent way headlines describe. It’s slow, crushing, and relentless — the kind that takes away one’s choices until escape becomes impossible.
Why Abandoned The Woman in the Decaying House is so unsettling is that it doesn’t need dramatic recreations or slasher-movie elements to make the gravity of what happened sink in. The horror is in the details — in the victim’s own words, in the pieces of the past constructed, and in the uneasy awareness that this went on for far longer than anyone should have allowed.
While most documentaries pretend to give voice to the victim, this one actually does. To listen to her, to listen to her telling in its complete form, changes your vision of every image on screen. It is not a mystery to be solved anymore, but a life to be understood. Her words bring out the isolation, the terror, and the resignation of someone trapped not only behind walls, but behind circumstances making the walls seem insurmountable.
Listening to actual recordings makes the experience almost intimate. You’re not just having it told to you — you’re going through it as if you’re present in the room when it’s being revealed. That intimacy is uncomfortable, but that’s what makes the story stick in your mind.
As I sat and watched, one thing kept poking at me: how was this possible and ignored for so long? The house remained, the woman remained, and the victim remained. People had to have seen, had to have wondered. And yet, for decades, nothing ever happened. Denial? Fear? Thinking it was “none of their business”? The docuseries doesn’t answer everything, and maybe it can’t — maybe that’s something we each have to wrestle with ourselves.
Also Read: Fit For TV: The Reality of The Biggest Loser Review: Unflinching, Shocking and Hard-Hitting
And then there’s the justice system. The deed hadn’t taken place behind closed doors in some out-of-the-way village; it took place in a world with laws, police, and courts. But pieces of the truth slipped through the cracks, and some folks went free. That, to me, was every bit as creepy as the crime itself.
By the time the docuseries finished, I didn’t have a neat sense of closure. I didn’t want one. This was not a story that needed to be tied up with a bow. What it left me with instead was a feeling, a mix of frustration, sadness, and a strange sense of awareness. We imagine that evil appears clear, something we’d know at once. But sometimes it is waiting in a house you walk past every day, in a neighbour you believe you can see, in someone who is smiling at you through a window.
The docuseries Abandoned: The Woman in the Decaying House works because it is not about giving the viewer easy satisfaction. It is about making us not be able to look away from how cruel people can become — and how easy it is for the rest of us to look away until it’s too late.
Abandoned The Woman in the Decaying House Review: Summing Up
It’s the kind of documentary that settles in your head, not because of gratuitous footage, but because it puts into perspective just how fragile freedom is. It shows how the most brutal thing can sometimes be done slowly, years at a time, in quiet, and the world might march right by it without even batting an eye. If you want comfort or certain justice, you won’t find it here. What you will find is a piece of reality as frightening as any novel — because it exists, and because it can happen again.
