Jonah Naplan   April 26, 2024

Any expectation you may have going into “Abigail” will be completely met in full force. That’s because this movie gives you exactly what you expect and exactly what you want. But it’s also the type of film that never really shocks or surprises you for those very reasons. It’s fun, for a little while. But it’s also formulaic for long stretches. And the wheels don’t really get greased and turning until about 50 minutes into this film’s 109-minute runtime. Gorehounds will rejoice in the third act of a movie about a vampire ballerina who slaughters a lot of criminals in a mansion, but will surely be underwhelmed by all the time the film spends with characters just standing around talking, and not even better developing themselves as individuals, either.

Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (known as “Radio Silence” in the horror world, and who previously helmed 2019’s “Ready or Not” as well as both of the recent “Scream” movies) know exactly the kind of movie they’re making and so do most of the actors onscreen who look like they’re having a good time bouncing off of each other and bantering back and forth. This is a high-concept horror movie with a limited cast of characters taking place in (mostly) a singular location. The screenplay by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick does a commendable job of adding just enough nuance to apply personality to the surroundings, feigning the right amount of characterization to pull off a believable, almost pseudo-Victorian atmosphere stuffed with cobwebs, dark corridors, creaky floorboards, and murderous souls that plays as large of a role in the bloody finale as the actual people.

Essentially, a group of baddies led by Frank (Dan Stevens) have been hired by a mysterious figure named Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito) to kidnap Abigail (Alisha Weir), the 12-year-old ballerina daughter of a very important and wealthy man for a large ransom. They’ve been locked in a large manor to wait for 24 hours, the young girl handcuffed and blindfolded in a bed. It should be an easy job, so long as Abigail doesn’t unleash her deadly vampire powers and exact revenge on her nitwit captors. But these goons are not so lucky. Abigail is a ferocious teen vampire, and Weir is proud to play the part. She skips and glides, having a blast committing such extreme violence, and secures her spot among the other big names of the child actor world, likely to become a major star. Her victims are all morally or ethically corrupt in one way or another, some more than their brethren, but no singular person is all that emotionally developed, so we aren’t too sad when they expire.

Stevens’ character proves himself early on to be the most deliberately villainous of the bunch, while others are more socially compromised: Dean (Angus Cloud, turning in a posthumous performance) is a confused drunk, Sammy (Kathryn Newton) is a bratty hacker, Rickles (William Catlett) is a former soldier who may or may not have something sneaky up his sleeve, and Peter (Kevin Durand) is a muscular hunk who probably flaunts his pecks on social media in his free time. The most sympathetic of them all is Joey (Melissa Barrera), of whom Radio Silence positions as the sort-of protagonist amidst the chaos. From the very beginning, she bonds with the imprisoned Abigail, forming a sort of forbidden alliance that allows her to—spoilers!—get out safely in the end. We learn she has a son, which instantly renders her an emotional basis for a movie that otherwise never allows its other characters that same credibility.

Most of the characters in “Abigail” just end up as vessels for the title girl to kill off in increasingly gruesome ways, so don’t expect to learn much about their backgrounds or family lives because the movie doesn’t care to tell you. What it does care about, however, is delivering carnage, and when “Abigail” is truly let off its leash, it satisfies all our insatiable gnarly desires. On the other side of the coin, it’s still frustrating to think about how it takes too much time to actually get there; I checked my watch—Abigail is not officially revealed to be vampiric until 50 minutes into the movie, and by the time she is, it’s not a development that’s revealed in any intriguing way, probably not helped by the fact we already know from trailers how this is all gonna end up.

The good news is that all the technical and performative elements seem to be perfectly up-to-speed on what they’re supposed to do. This is a film that doesn’t take itself too seriously in the fear that an audience member will lose interest, so it lives in an extremist area where it’s constantly trying to entertain you, one-upping itself over and over again to maximize the shock value in the violence. (The myths of vampires being defeated by sunlight and stakes to the heart have here been dramatically accentuated in that the result is an instant explosion, guts and blood flying everywhere, rather than a slow shrivel).

“Abigail” wraps up with a series of full-circle moments that foreground themes of relationship trauma, greed and love, all relevant topics that draw back to the central motivation of this whole kidnapping plot. It may not be so much that characters monologue at each other about these things (for most of the movie, they’re seen stumbling across rooms, running away from something or someone scary), but the most important ones—namely Joey and Frank—seem to echo a certain ideology this movie wants to identify with, which is the idea of fulfilling oneself in the eyes of a superior, and how failure to trust a colleague can result in tragedy. That “Abigail” unpacks its themes and gore with such vigor makes it easier to dismiss the one-dimensional characters. But, I suppose, we are supposed to be rooting for Abigail to kill anyway, so whaddya know?

Now playing in theaters.