The Abandoned (2023) Movie Ending Explained: Who is the killer and what is the motive behind the kills?

The Taiwanese film “The Abandoned (Cha wu ci xin),” currently streaming on Netflix, is one of those “a dead corpse chooses its cop” movies where the protagonist – in this case, a cop is going through turmoil in life, experiencing self-awakening or closure as she takes on a serial killer case. It is so generic that it doesn’t try much in terms of hiding its flaws but rather plays along to tell a story because serial killer stories always sell.

Directed by Tseng Ying-ting (who has also written the story along with Yang Yi-chien, Lin Pin-chun, and Hsu Shih-hui), the film has a stylistic direction, but it doesn’t help the film become something more than just another tired thriller film. Nonetheless, here is a detailed explanation of what takes place in the film. Please be aware that the article includes spoilers; reader discretion is adviced.

The Abandoned (2023) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:

Police officer Wu Jie recently lost her fiancé to depression when he committed suicide by shooting himself in their car. Unable to process her grief and complete lost in life, she too wants to end her life in the same manner. However, before she could do that, a panic-stricken woman knocks on the door, as someone has discovered a severely bruised dead body of a woman. With that, Wu Jie gets assigned to the case of the muder despite mentioning her transfer request to her boss. Cai Wei-shan, a rookie police officer, is also assigned to look over the case. Since Wu Jie just wants to get rid of her duty, she decides to assist in the case nonetheless.

In the meantime, we are introduced to Yu-sheng, who turns out to be a person helping immigrants enter Taiwan by forging their documents and getting them jobs. Waree Napho is the migrant Thai worker whose body Wu found and is now investigating. Yu-sheng had helped her when she entered the country illegally, forging her documents and arranging work. However, he fell in love with her. Seeing that Yu-sheng wasn’t committed to their relationship, she started seeing a man named Mankong – another worker who had been running away from the police for the past ten years. We later learn he was the one who tipped off the police and sent them the cuffs that came with Waree’s body after he was forced to dump it.

What is the pattern of the killer, and how did Detective Wu connect the case to Yu-sheng?

We get to judge and doubt Yu-sheng as the suspect because he had a motive to kill Waree, who had broken up with him before she went missing. The narrative of the investigation and that of Yu-sheng’s whereabouts are cut together when Saipin Napho – Waree’s sister also arrives in Taiwan. Yu-sheng helps her by getting her photos clicked and forging her documents, but she soon confesses that she is Waree’s sister and is here only to know her whereabouts after she went missing. The story starts making more sense when the detectives show up on Yu-sheng’s doorsteps by connecting the dots of illegal documents and multiple missing cases.

While Yu-sheng is initially apprehensive of confessing anything about his illegal work but when he gets to know that Waree is dead, he also confesses to having disposed of the corpse of an Indonesian immigrant woman named Yeti Ayoni. When he goes to Mankong in order to learn why he did what he did to Waree, he realizes that Mankong was also forced to dispose of Waree’s body like he was with Yeti’s.

All this happening allows the detective to come to the conclusion that the killer has been targeting migrant workers who have no family or friends. The killer would contact the workers’ employers from the victim’s mobile phone so that they would dispose of the body. Since the employers have been employing illegal workers, they had no other option but to dispose the bodies for the killer.

Even though the killer was extremely cautious, the only mistake in the plan was to use the victim’s cell phone to contact the next victim, and Detective Wu is able to make that connection leading to a substantial breakthrough. Upon going through their files, Detective Wu discovers that the killer has been killing all the victims on their birthdays, revealing the first major pattern in the serial killer’s plan. Since Wu was now aware of the killer’s instincts, she comes to the realization that the next victim would be Saipin Napho – Waree’s sister.

Who is the killer and what is the motive behind the kills?

Previously, we had seen Yu-sheng sending Saipin Napho to Huang Tung-chi – his friend and associate’s house, but on receiving an encrypted call from the killer, she had left in a hurry. Detective Wu’s next target thus becomes Tung-chi, whose taxi was used by Saipin Napho. However, when she tracks down Tung-chi, it is revealed that the killer was using Tung-chi’s license plate to drive the victims to his warehouse. Detective Wu uses the department tracking systems fitted in every car to eventually get the killer’s location.

Yu-sheng, Detective Wu, and Cai Wei-shan get to the location and discover the killer’s car. Yu-sheng finds the identity card of the killer in the car’s dashboard, and it is revealed to be Fan Chang-fu – the photographer who helped him forge fake documents for the illegal immigrants. This makes Yu-sheng realize that it was he who was responsible for unknowingly bringing all the victims to the killer. This angers him. While the three of them are waiting for backup at the parking lot, Chang-fu drives in, and a fight between them ensues. In the confusion and mishap, Chang-fu, who tries to run away, is captured, but before that, he stabs Detective Wu’s partner, Cai Wei-shan, who is then taken to the hospital.

Detective Wu then cuffs Chang-fu to her car and asks him to take them to Saipin Napho. However, Chang-fu asks to take a detour to his house in order to feed his dog. He cunningly coaxes Yu-sheng, who discovers all the hearts and fingers that he had cut from the victims. Yu-sheng’s anger boils to the maximum, and he attacks Chang-fu in extreme rage. Detective Wu is forced to shoot at Yu-sheng’s knee to break the fight. She then takes the killer to his place of work – an abandoned warehouse where he didn’t just torture and kill his victims but also captured weird, supposedly married portraits with the victims.

While it is not clearly shown, we can assume that he killed these women because he was once married to an illegal immigrant himself. A flashback sequence tells us that his wife left him just after her birthday, making him despise all of these illegal women and immigrants in general as they were stealing jobs from their hands. The sequence also establishes that this woman escaped from him by poisoning her birthday cake and running away after Chang-fu and his mother were in a deep sleep. His idea of love thus became killing the women on their birthday and taking their hearts and ring fingers – which is connected by a vein called Vena Amores (vein of love). In his own twisted way, keeping these trophies means that none of these women or their love would ever abandon him in the way that his wife did.

In a way, both Chang-fu and Detective Wu are connected to each other by this idea of “being abandoned.”

The Abandoned (2023) Movie Ending Explained:

Is Detective Wu able to free her life along with Saipin Napho’s?

Anyway, Detective Wu decides to take Chang-fu directly to the warehouse without waiting for backup because Saipin Napho’s life is at stake. The two of them get into the warehouse and lead to the chamber that we saw at the beginning of the film. This is the same chamber where Chang-fu had earlier poisoned Saipin Napho by filling it up with carbon monoxide. He opens the locked chamber with a secret combination and fights with Detective Wu, who has a gun to his head. After failing to lock her, he fights her again – this time trying to kill her. However, the chaos and back and forth lead to Wu shooting Chang-fu, who dies.

With Chang-fu now dead and Detective Wu locked inside with Saipin, she is forced to rethink her own misery. A flashback shows us the time when her fiancé proposed and she said yes. The pain of losing him and being abandoned does not turn her into a killer like Chang-fu but gives her strength. This and the fact that she needed to save Saipin Napho’s life makes her break the glass window in the chamber leading the poisonous gas to escape.

The ending of The Abandoned establishes that Detective Wu could not understand the reason behind her fiancé committing suicide. However, through this case, she was able to understand that running away from the past by taking the easy way out isn’t an option. With so much misery around her, focusing on herself and not her duty as a police officer wouldn’t be the right way to be. The concluding moments of the film show us that she now has a new companion in Chang-fu’s dog. Cai and Yu-sheng are both alright and well.

Read More: Everything Coming To Netflix in January 2024

Trailer:

The Abandoned (2023) Movie Links: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Wikipedia, Letterboxd
The Abandoned (2023) Movie Cast: Janine Chang, Ethan Juan
The Abandoned (2023) Movie Genre: Mystery & thriller, Runtime: 2h 8m

Where to watch The Abandoned