Radio Silence Returns with Abigail
The collective known as Radio Silence (led by directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett), who made Ready or Not in 2019, has again combined the subgenres of “twisty horror” and “a bunch of people trapped together in a big mansion.” The result is Abigail, a film that starts as a kidnapping thriller and soon becomes very different. Revealing the source material—a semi-remake of a genre film from nearly 90 years ago—would give away just about everything that happens. I can say that Abigail gets violent and bloody very often.
Abigail has some excellent ideas at play, its cast is strong, and it makes good use of its single location much like Ready or Not did. However, some key scenes are shot incoherently, and the plot is too twisty by the end.
The plot borrows a couple of beats from Reservoir Dogs, including multiple scenes of three or more characters pointing guns at one another and all getting aliases so they can’t rat on each other (rather than Mr. Pink and Mr. White, they’re all named after members of the Rat Pack, so the characters spend the whole movie calling each other “Frank,” “Sammy” and “Joey”). Also, like last year’s horror movie M3GAN and the Netflix series Wednesday, Abigail features multiple scenes of a young girl dancing strangely; that’s a trend the filmmakers sought to capitalize on.
As the film begins, six strangers are brought together as part of a kidnapping plot involving the titular 12-year-old girl (Alisha Weir), whom they know only is the daughter of a wealthy man who’s likely to pay a massive ransom. Assembled by a handler (Giancarlo Esposito) who tells them little about the mission, the kidnappers are a woman who forms a motherly bond with Abigail (Melissa Barrera), a shifty ex-cop (Dan Stevens), a goth-clad wealthy girl/computer hacker (Kathryn Newton), an ex-military guy (William Catlett), the muscle (Kevin Durand) and a Post Malone type (Angus Cloud, the Euphoria actor who passed away last year, shortly after finishing his work on the film).
They must spend 24 hours together in a large, possibly haunted house, including lots of rooms for fights and side quests, which was much the same setup as Ready or Not. And just as Ready or Not had a recurring Beethoven motif, Abigail repeatedly uses the Swan Lake music.
The film shifts on its axis two or three times over its 100 minutes, in time for big twists that recalibrate everything we thought we knew. The banter is well-written and delivered, especially as the kidnappers begin to turn on one another.
Barrera—recently fired from the Scream franchise, currently run by the Radio Silence filmmakers, for innocuous pro-Palestinian comments—makes an exemplary anchor for the film. Stevens, one of those actors I can never recognize from role to role, is wonderfully squirrely. Newton expertly handles her character’s twists; now that she’s 27, it’s good to see her finally no longer playing a high school student. As for Durand, he now bears such a strong resemblance to Elon Musk that it’s a distraction.
I wish the third act were better. There’s too much of the nauseating swinging-camera work in vogue these days; the recent Monkey Man was pretty much only that. Still, Abigail is likely to appeal to fans of horror and of those particular actors.