Abigail (2024)

Score: 3.5 / 5

I don't often get on this soapbox but today is the day. Marketing rarely matters to me personally, and I don't usually avoid spoilers because regardless of what "happens" in a film, in terms of plot, I'd rather focus on other elements. But for a film whose primary purpose seems to be its unique mashup of genres, a film that hinges on its own conceptual novelty, to broadcast its main point of interest -- and its only twist -- without room for doubt or speculation in its trailers, is a problem.

Everyone knows it by now, so it's no spoiler: Abigail features its titular character as its antagonist, a little girl whose desire to be a ballerina far exceeds her desire for blood. She's a vampire. This high-concept horror aspect of the film doesn't materialize until about halfway through, about the time when we need something to pick up the energy and raise the stakes. For the first half, though, the film is simply a home invasion thriller, a crime heist in which a needlessly large group of criminals kidnap Abigail, the daughter of a powerful underworld figure in NYC and hold her in an upstate mansion. Their goal is to hold her for 24 hours and they'll each get a massive payout.

Note: the money is laughably excessive and a general disregard for the specifics of any plot details makes even the start of this film difficult to swallow. You've got to give your audience a little more than "big money, easy target, some crime" to make your story compelling. And delightful as his presence is, it takes more than a spooky Giancarlo Esposito setting the scene to make for a chilling premise. It's as though the writers were so eager to get to the climactic encounter between vampire ballerina child and adult thugs that they didn't really care to set it up properly.

Thankfully, the cast are likable and interesting enough to help carry us over any initial misgivings. Not that any of them are written with depth or intrigue, mind. But Dan Stevens, Kevin Durand, Kathryn Newton, Will Catlett, and the late Angus Cloud are all compelling in their own ways, especially Stevens here, whose deliciously wicked streak of unpredictability carries most of the group scenes. Melissa Barrera is unfortunately slighted by the screenplay, which treats her character as a sort of anti-heroine, so thinly drawn she couldn't stand up to any analysis and so blandly delivered that I repeatedly forgot it was the otherwise skilled actress. To be fair, it's a thankless role, and I don't think she played it badly; there's just so little for her to work with or believably imbue into the role. 

Alisha Weir plays the title role with a confidence and charm that, frankly, shocked me. Reportedly doing most of her own stunts, she embodies a physical force of evil like I haven't seen in a film in years. People will surely compare this film to M3GAN, but the dancing and violent little girl are shallow comparison points; that film was a mess, but this one consistently knows what it's doing and why. By the time she's given the full monster treatment -- with some excellent makeup and special effects -- the film tips over the edge into a gorefest that makes its latter half infinitely more entertaining. Well-choreographed action scenes see Abigail chasing her prey through Gothic halls, and though frenetic editing makes for some truly hard-to-watch sequences (the editor should be slapped for repeatedly cutting right at the most interesting part or before the actor actually enters the frame of the shot where action is supposed to be occurring), at least it is a fun time to watch.

It just sucks that there is no further interest in the premise. Can we get mad at a film for giving us exactly what it promises us? Perhaps not, but when the trailer is essentially the entire story, what's the point of a 90-minute screening when a 90-second trailer will suffice? When the marketing spoils something as crucial as "hey, the girl you're about to kidnap is actually a vampire that will suck you dry one by one," you naturally expect there to be a further twist in the narrative, a point to be made, even a surprise character or additional plot to follow. Think about Don't Breathe, which has a somewhat similar opening premise. Hell, think about previous films from co-directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett. They seem to have the most fun once Abigail is found out and the characters run amok through the mansion (which has more character than any of the characters) playing a vampiric version of Clue. Actually, there isn't any real mystery here, despite the film's determination to reference Agatha Christie multiple times. The writers don't even seem to care much about the characters they do have, referring to them not with their real names but with Rat Pack-inspired codenames.

It's hard to critique a film in which there was ultimately so little left to explore, because it felt like a rewatch despite it being a first viewing. It's hard to feel excitement or attachment for talented actors playing unbearably shallow characters, especially when you know they're just vampire fodder. It's hard to feel the intelligence of these filmmakers when you see every beat coming well in advance and it's all slowed down by tedious dialogue that should have been workshopped out. I don't understand why the marketing didn't focus on the first half of the film alone so that the delightful reveal of sweet Abigail with her monstrous teeth could come earlier and with more impact. I quite thoroughly enjoyed the film, especially as the B-movie it really is, but I do wish it had scrapped its own marketing budget and paid its writers better. For a horror-comedy, it's never very scary and prompts few laughs (I only really laughed each time a vampire dies, because they explode with a violence that took me completely by surprise), but it gets away with it by sheer bravura in its own conceit.

P.S.: I ran across an interview with the filmmakers that said Universal had planned for this project to be a remake of Dracula's Daughter (1936), and while that title would certainly not have worked for this film, it does add points of interest to note. That film, notoriously heavy with its lesbian subtext, has nothing in common with this film, and while a young vampiric ballerina will surely make for a popular Halloween costume this year, I'd have been much more interested in this film being willing to explore that dynamic more. Perhaps, like the many werewolf movies about young men growing into their monstrous selves, this could have been a coming-of-age story about Dracula's daughter, even with her ballet, learning to become herself. What we get instead is so utterly divergent from the source material that any latent sexuality, gender nonconformity, or even intergenerational connectivity is lost, sacrificed for spectacle and bleak humor.

P.P.S.: Another way to approach this that I'd have preferred: start the film with Stevens or Barrera getting bitten and infected by Abigail or her father. Let them choose to undergo the vampire transformation in order to become their enemy and try to hunt them down, kind of like Blade. If Barrera, we could reinforce some more of the lesbian content in the source material, and it would allow us to skip over the needlessly detailed exposition and excessive setup.