What If We Didn’t Know Abigail Was a Vampire Movie?
It’s tough when your movie’s premise also happens to be its biggest and best reveal. The new horror film Abigail follows a group of kidnappers who capture a rich man’s daughter after ballet rehearsal and stash her away in a safe house, whereupon they discover that the little girl (played by Alisha Weir) is a vampire, and that they’re actually locked in there with her, not the other way around. To be clear, this is all in the trailer. It’s the reason for the movie’s very existence: Come see the tiny ballerina vampire butcher these hapless kidnappers! It’s not a bad sell, either. I was intrigued by the movie when I first saw the trailer, and I remained so even after being forced to watch it approximately 398 more times.
Still, I couldn’t also help but wonder how Abigail might have played if one were to go into it a blank slate — if we didn’t know it was a vampire story and were simply pulled along with the rest of the cast into the creepy goings-on at this suspiciously giant mansion in the middle of nowhere. We don’t discover that poor, whimpering Abigail is actually a fanged, undead (and acrobatic) beast until about 40 minutes into the movie, as the girl casually slips her bonds and shrieks and bares her fangs at her thunderstruck captors. The young Irish actress Weir (who made such an impression in the recent Matilda remake) strikes a convincingly helpless pose up until that point, and once Abigail lets go, her loose-limbed, surreally pirouetting savagery sends the picture spinning in a bloody new direction. It’s a great reveal, and it could have made a fine surprise if modern movie marketing would let it. What if we could go into these films — yes, even the big, IP-driven studio ones — without knowing anything about them?
I’m not about to argue, however, that Abigail would be some kind of secret masterpiece if we could only have stayed spoiler-free. That would have required more thought and care put into its characters. Instead, before learning about Abigail’s true nature, we watch this somewhat clueless collection of anonymous kidnappers start bickering unconvincingly among themselves. They’re not supposed to reveal their true identities and are only referred to by names from the Rat Pack, but one of them, the street-smart Joey (Melissa Barrera), a former addict, is such a good reader of people that she deduces each person’s background right away. There’s Frank (Dan Stevens), a former detective who went corrupt; Sammy (Kathryn Newton), a thrill-seeking rich-girl hacker; Rickles (Will Catlett), a former marine; Peter (Kevin Durand), a muscle-bound former mob goon who looks like someone tried to Brundlefly Elon Musk and an aging Arnold Schwarzenegger; and Dean (Angus Cloud), an intellectually challenged sociopathic getaway driver.
Aside from Barrera’s Joey, these are more caricatures than people, since they’re mostly there to be picked off. So maybe the anticipation of impending vampire shenanigans is a boon in this regard: It keeps us from thinking too hard about this ridiculous kidnapping scheme and from caring too much about any of these people. One exception is Cloud’s Dean: The young Euphoria actor died unexpectedly last July, right after wrapping Abigail, and his offbeat energy is at times so captivating that we miss it when he’s not onscreen; knowing that the actor is no more makes the loss even deeper.
Ultimately, Abigail settles into a fairly predictable rhythm of people running around a dark mansion getting killed one by one, but it does occasionally demonstrate a twisted playfulness. Abigail is a ballerina, after all, and she delights in dancing as much as she delights in slaughter. When she begins to control one character’s mind (vampires can do that, you know), she first makes the other person dance — which sounds just as weird as it feels onscreen in a good way. Alas, the problem with such brief moments of inspiration is that they usually make us wonder why there aren’t more of them.
At times, Abigail seems more interested in its rating than its characters or story. It’s proudly rated R, not so much for intensity or any genuinely disturbing material but because every other line of dialogue appears to be “fuck!” and it’s filled with people exploding in (admittedly hilarious) supernovas of blood. It’s a cheap-thrill movie, and on that score it mostly delivers. There are beheadings and face shreddings and throat rippings and blood vomiting and a pool filled with shit and corpses. The amped-up gore elevates the film’s shlock value but not its suspense — and certainly not its potency. So maybe I should take it all back: Abigail probably only works if you know exactly what it is going in.