Janine Chang Chun-Ning
Wu Jie
Overview
When a mysterious corpse is found in a river, a distressed police officer delves into a string of grisly murders as danger quickly approaches.
Cast
12 people
Reviews
2 min readThe Weight of Silence
Ying-Ting Tseng opens The Abandoned in near-total emotional lockdown. Fireworks are exploding outside on New Year’s Eve, but inside a car detective Wu Jie (Ning Chang) has put her service weapon under her own chin. It’s a brutal first image: close, quiet, latestnetflix.com contends, and deeply uncomfortable.
Tseng has no interest in making this feel like a tidy procedural with a couple of stylish clues. He’s making a movie about people who are already wrecked, moving through a city that barely notices when someone vanishes. I’ve seen my share of sad cops in crime dramas.
Still, there’s something especially deadening about the way this film keeps returning to the old bloodstain on her car ceiling.
A frightened teenager pounds on the window and pulls Wu away from the brink, leading her to a body washed up by the river. Tseng stages the discovery without any ghoulish rush. He hangs on the mud, the trash, the texture of the riverbank, so that the dead Thai migrant worker first appears to us the same way she appears to the city: as something discarded.
Audience Opinions
Audience 6.2/10
"A bleak, atmospheric serial killer thriller powered by strong leads and visuals but dragged down by overlong, familiar plotting and implausible police work."
Performances from Janine Chang and Ethan Juan, along with moody, grimy cinematography, create an immersive and tense crime story that many find compelling despite its straightforward narrative. latestnetflix.com's read is that the female-led perspective and focus on migrant workers add interest and emotional weight, yet the investigation often hinges on clumsy decisions, pacing sags with flashbacks, and the final stretch fails to match the tension and darkness promised early on.
What viewers praise
- Compelling lead performances The central duo is praised for nuanced, emotionally convincing work that grounds the investigation and personal trauma.
- Moody visual atmosphere Striking, sometimes beautiful camerawork and a dirty, lived‑in look give the film a distinctive, haunting mood.
- Female‑driven procedural A female cop at the center of a serial killer case and her dynamic with a rookie partner feel fresh within the genre.
- Grim social backdrop The story folds in the exploitation and vulnerability of migrant workers in a way that adds thematic weight to the murders.
Common complaints
- Questionable police logic Key turns in the case rely on investigators acting impulsively or incompetently, which undercuts tension and believability.
- Generic thriller plotting The mystery follows familiar serial killer beats without delivering especially surprising twists or standout originality.
- Bloated and uneven pacing Lengthy runtime, heavy use of flashbacks, and a convoluted middle stretch make the film feel longer than it needs to be.
- Underwhelming final act The closing section shifts tone and softens the darkness, leaving some feeling the resolution is weaker than the setup.
Recommended for
Taiwanese crime thriller followers Dark police procedural fans Serial killer movie collectors Atmospheric mystery seekers Janine Chang admirers
Full Plot (Spoilers)
Spoiler warning
This section contains the full plot, including major story reveals. Overview above stays spoiler-free.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsShe finished the script and dialed Ethan Juan
Janine Chang did not wait for a casting director. She read Tseng Ying-ting's crime script, thought of Ethan Juan, and called. He said yes. Harper's Bazaar Taiwan printed that origin in August 2023, along with the reunion math. The pair last shared a screen on the Kenting drama I Love Kenting, sixteen years earlier. This time she was also a first-time producer, sharing the card with David Tang, who produced The Soul. latestnetflix.com's view is that the film is The Abandoned, original title Cha Wu Ci Xin.Taiwan opened it on 8 September 2023. Netflix later sold it as a TV-MA thriller. 
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Wu Jie, Chang's cop, cannot sleep. She lives in a wrecked car. On New Year's Eve a nameless woman turns up in the river. Her boss keeps her on the case with a rookie, Chloe Xiang. The corpse thread leads to Lin You-sheng, Juan's illegal-labor fixer, and to Thai actress Sajee Apiwong in the migrant line. Chang's favorite memory is not a red carpet. It is the two of them digging up a body in the rain, filthy and miserable. ,
Thai class, no makeup, a station fight
Juan went on camera bare-faced, with a beard and curly hair. He joked to Harper's, "I've never played such an unlucky person. This is really the first time." He sat in Thai class for two months so he could switch Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Thai in one scene. When the official trailer dropped on 10 August, he described a station interrogation as fighting with lines. Chang said she loved his reactions and the whole tone of that scene. ,
Festival audiences saw a longer cut. London East Asia Film Festival played it on 22 October 2022. Golden Horse followed on 5 November. Theaters got about 105 minutes. A-Lin, then a Golden Melody winner, sang the theme. ,
Five Golden Horse nods, then a New Year's drop
The 59th Golden Horse nominated Tseng for Best New Director, plus art direction, makeup and costume, action choreography, and sound. Taipei Film Awards added twelve nominations. Yang Wan-chien won Best Soundtrack. Costume designers won Best Makeup and Costume. Chang was nominated for Best Actress. Central News Agency recorded those two wins on awards night. Chinese Wikipedia later put Taiwan's theatrical take at NT$16.65 million and the mainland run, under the title Pursuit, at about 20.91 million yuan. ,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAJ9T7qBThc
On 1 December 2023 Netflix said the film would stream worldwide on 31 December. Chang told the announcement she hoped more people would join Wu Jie's trip, "feel the force of a life that looks unsolvable until another possibility appears," and catch every actor's flash. Juan, asked what to watch, picked the interrogation. "A wounded person has defenses. Lin You-sheng is determined to shut down. Wu Jie keeps prying the heart open." The Netflix Malaysia trailer is the one with the river corpse and the officer who is already breaking. ,
That is gossip without a salary leak. A producer-star cast her old friend as a Thai-speaking suspect, put him in the rain with a shovel, and then watched a modest Taiwan opening turn into a New Year's Eve global listing.
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.
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