ABIGAIL (2024) review
written by: Stephen Shields and Guy Busick
produced by: Paul Neinstein, William Sherak, James Vanderbilt, Chad Villella, Tripp Vinson
directed by: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett
rated: R (for strong bloody violence and gore throughout, pervasive language and brief drug use)
runtime: 109 min
U.S. release date: April 19, 2024 (wide)
“Okay. What do we know about vampires?”
“That they’re not real.”
A team of crooks who have never worked together before execute a heist, pulling off a harrowing mission to kidnap a pre-teen girl and bring her to an isolated cabin where she will be held for ransom. The girl is the daughter of a wealthy businessman, but few details about her are known to the crew hired to babysit her for 24 hours. As Agatha Christie-style paranoia takes over the gang of criminals, they quickly discover that they’re not actually in an action thriller; they’re in a full-on monster horror movie.
“Abigail” comes from directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, otherwise known as Radio Silence. They delivered the fun and clever “Ready or Not” and the two most recent “Scream” sequels, neither of which I’ve seen. They deliver a steady presence behind the camera, whether shooting car chase action sequences or confined haunted house horror set-ups. That cine-literate style is well served by material that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
In terms of genre rug pulls, this will probably play better years from now when the advertising campaign is forgotten, and the switch from an action-oriented heist movie to a full-on horror survival movie will feel a little less inevitable. “The Descent” comes to mind in terms of films that have done this kind of thing well in the past, so it’s not an entirely novel concept. However, I would bet these dudes have seen “The Descent” and know the pitfalls to avoid.
The script is from Stephen Shields and Guy Busick, the latter of whom has worked on Radio Silence’s last three features, so there’s a certain sense of leaning into the things they do well. One of the things they do well is giving us a solid core of characters, keeping them anonymous by naming them after members of the Rat Pack, and developing tension out of exploiting their individual weaknesses. The disgraced cop, the former soldier, the disaffected rich girl hacker, and the mom desperate to reconnect with her estranged son are all fun archetypes, and all the characters are well-cast.
Kevin Durand, an actor whose SEO is screwed by the existence of NBA player Kevin Durant—meaning you have to type all the way to the last “d” before Durand shows up on Google—is an actor who can go big when he needs to, but who has harnessed that jock in the high school play earnestness for the better here. Unfortunately, his strong resemblance to Elon Musk makes him difficult to root for, but that’s not his fault.
Radio Silence’s final girl of choice, Melissa Barrera, does solid work here, making the most of a role positively drowning in cliches. She can hold the screen in a way not every other actor in the film can do, Dan Stevens notwithstanding. Stevens goes waist-deep into the river of ham slowly but surely throughout the film but is full-on snorkeling through it by the third act. I’m happy to see him learn the lesson that other very pretty male actors before him, like Colin Farrell, have learned, and that’s to embrace the esoteric character roles.
Giancarlo Esposito is literally there to spout exposition and lend the proceedings an air of legitimacy, but he does it well. The late young actor Angus Cloud is a lot of fun and it’s tragic to learn of his passing in real life, he displays a lot of potential here. If I’m forced to say there’s a weak link, it’s probably Katherine Langford as the aforementioned disaffected rich girl hacker, but that’s more a function of her role. Thankfully her final scene proves she was cast in that role for a reason, a pas de deux between Alisha Weir’s title character and Langford, calling to mind a similar tour de force sequence in Luca Guadanino’s otherwise catatonic “Suspiria” remake.
However, I have to take the filmmakers to task for setting it to Danzig’s “Blood and Tears” when they could have tipped the cap to their genre forebears by using “Cry Little Sister (Theme from ‘The Lost Boys’)” and made it something truly epic. In fact, if someone with better editing skills than I should make this and put it on YouTube, I would watch it. Others would presumably enjoy it as well.
By the time a character shows up that makes me ask, “Is that Jeremy Irons?”—spoiler alert: It wasn’t—you may feel the old bladder reminding you of its existence. That text you got an hour ago—maybe you can sneak a peek and make sure it’s nothing urgent.
The film is ultimately a casualty of bloat, and what could have been a lean, mean 90-minute horror comedy instead runs the same length as “Civil War” two screens over. That film has nonstop propulsion, and you’re surprised it was actually 109 minutes. Here, you start to feel the length much too far from the ending, wondering why there are still so many people alive this far past the one-hour mark.
But Holy Hannah, this film asks an awful lot of young Alisha Weir and she knocks it out of the park. I’m reminded of other recent performances like Ingrid Torelli from “Late Night with the Devil” and even Julia Butters from “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” there’s movie star poise alongside an ability to drastically shift tones in an instant. She apparently played the title role in “Matilda the Musical” on Netflix, which I still need to check out, but she’s a revelation here, able to hoist the film onto her shoulders and carry it across the finish line.
As more and more film nerds become genre filmmakers, solid little gems like this will continue to be made. It’s not groundbreaking but it’s not without merit. It’s more than competent and will appeal not only to the horror hounds, the easiest lay in all of movie fandom but also to the folks who say they don’t like scary movies. This is scary but also funny, charming, and irreverent. It has a ton of gore and, above everything else, knows where the ceiling is.
RATING: ***
