Abigail (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett): ** 1/2
Just in case you needed another reason why not to kidnap a child, horror-comedy Abigail gives you one: the child could be Dracula’s daughter. That’s what the six kidnappers discover about the 12-year-old ballerina they take hostage in the picture, as she turns out to be older and less graceful than thought when she chews each of them apart one by one. This premise is the only fresh thing about Abigail, a slick but unexceptional film—the type of movie you have fun with on Friday night before forgetting about by Saturday morning.
The kidnappers include leader and ex-cop Frank (Dan Stevens), muscle man Peter (Kevin Durand), sniper Rickles (Will Catlett), hacker Sammy (Kathryn Newton), and getaway driver Dean (Angus Cloud). Hired by Lambert (Giancarlo Espisito), the man who supplies them those code names, the group snatches Abigail (Alisha Weir) from her mansion, stashes her in another mansion, and plans to wait 24 hours till her anonymous-to-them father pays her ransom. Very quickly, however, the kidnappers learn Abigail is not the scared, vulnerable, and powerless girl they assumed, but a blood-drinking, flesh-feasting monster. For the rest of the movie, they try to survive in the big house against the little devil, running into traps, lack of electronic communication, and dead bodies. Their best bet at making out alive ends up being Joey (Melissa Barrera), the team’s doctor, who develops a bond with Abigail early since Joey has a kid she hasn’t seen in years.
Everything about Abigail is competently done. There’s not much to complain about with the suspense, scares, funny character interactions, confrontations between the team and Abigail, and filmmaking. The problem is there’s little else other than competence. There’s no sequence that sharpens suspense or horror to an unbearable degree. There’s no profound truth about the human condition communicated in a funny or touching way through the characters. There are zero ideas that rattle around in the brain afterwards.
The picture takes time to reveal Abigail is a vampire. God knows why since that’s all the trailers emphasize to lure audiences in. It seems like the film wants you to get to know its characters before throwing them in danger. But turns out listing off traits around a kitchen table isn’t the same as creating empathy for people. Thankfully, the movie’s cast members are skilled at embodying their figures’ personalities. They play off each other in a way that is charming when they’re opening up and tense when they’re clashing. By the time Abigail finally begins hunting, you root for them to scrape by. You especially hope for the safety of the delightful Kathryn Newton and the late lovable aloof Angus Cloud, the two stand out from the ensemble along with Alisha Weir—who balances Abigail’s fragile appearance and vicious reality.
Abigail’s cat-and-mouse game allows the art to spotlight the mansion. The set’s opulence and mix of bright lights with shadows are gorgeously shot by First Omen cinematographer Aaron Morton. However, the production design isn’t imaginative enough for the house to be memorable the way some recent cinematic rich homes have been—like the ones in Parasite or Saltburn. Still, it’s suspenseful, scary, and occasionally funny to watch the characters uncover rat-infested basements, swim through corpse-filled tunnels, tepidly move through dark spaces, explore rooms and behind doors for escape routes, and fashion weapons out of library books, pool sticks, boarded windows, and garlic cloves.
Such antics sustain Abigail for most of its runtime, especially as the picture wisely understands its greatest strength is its performers and lets many characters live long. But the movie stumbles because it doesn’t know how to wrap up. There are many kills and fight scenes near the finale to juice Abigail’s body count, but these scenes fall flat because they unfold too rapidly and too close to the camera. Another issue is how Giancarlo Esposito’s Lambert is used. He’s provided a twist to give the remarkably talented Esposito something to do, but the reveal’s aftermath is so lazily handled that he still feels wasted.
However, the conclusion’s biggest weakness is how it foregrounds the relationship between Barrera’s Joey and Abigail. The movie wants their bond to be its heart, a surrogate mother-daughter pair that gives Joey and Abigail what they’re missing from their lives (a child to nurture for Joey, a caring parent for Abigail). Unfortunately, there are too few scenes involving them connecting with each other, too few moments in which they grow closer in a way that feels human, and too few notions about what such strange intimacy means that their partnership cannot make a lasting impact as the film ends.
Trying to highlight a mother-daughter dynamic between monster and human is one way Abigail is reminiscent of last year’s playfully smart M3GAN (the other, as Sean Burns points out, is by containing a dance sequence). However, M3GAN had ideas and emotions to express about absent parenting, childhood, and the way family serves as a shield against and gateway to horror. Abigail says nothing about such matters other than that if you’re going to kidnap Dracula’s daughter, caring for her like a parent gives you a better chance of not becoming a vampire.
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