Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett Screenplay: Stephen Shields and Guy Busick Cast: Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Alisha Weir, Kathryn Newton, Kevin Durand, Giancarlo Esposito Year: 2024
Of everything the horror genre has to offer, vampires are my favorite creatures, and that has a curious side effect, since I can objectively recognize that a vampire movie is bad and still enjoy it from start to finish. So when a genuinely good one comes along, the surprise counts twice, and "Abigail" lands squarely in that group. It's directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the Radio Silence duo who already locked a group of characters inside a blood-soaked mansion full of dark humor in "Ready or Not", and here they return to that formula with fangs involved.
In "Abigail" we follow a crew of mercenaries who kidnap a young ballerina, the daughter of a powerful man, with a plan that looks simple on paper: hold her hostage in a remote mansion for one night, collect the ransom, split the money and scatter. The crew includes Joey (Melissa Barrera), Frank (Dan Stevens), Sammy (Kathryn Newton) and Peter (Kevin Durand), and the kidnapping goes exactly as planned. The trouble starts when that quiet night is broken by a first death whose violence doesn't look human, and what was an easy job turns into a hunt in which the kidnappers become the prey. The film never really hides what Abigail is, given that its own marketing sells her as a child vampire, so the fun lies in watching how long it takes them to figure it out.
The premise is simple, and honestly it doesn't need anything more. From the start the film builds two tensions at once, one inside the group, where nobody trusts anybody and everyone is looking out for their own skin, and one inside the house, where the bodies start piling up with no one sure who is responsible. Once the violence escalates, each feeds the other. The child vampire has its own lineage in the genre, from Claudia in "Interview with the Vampire" to Eli in "Let the Right One In", but where those films use the child's body to talk about loneliness and frozen time, "Abigail" turns it into a cruel joke about how badly we underestimate whatever looks harmless.
The scenes that blend ballet with horror are what I liked most. Ballet has always been seen as polished, elegant and controlled down to the last gesture, and here we watch it performed in a pool of blood by a girl who looks innocent at first and turns out to be a vicious monster. Much of that rests on Alisha Weir, who handles the shift from frightened child to predator with real precision, and who also has in-between moments where she looks like an ordinary kid again while delivering sarcastic lines that clash completely with how she looks. Even drenched in blood she still reads as innocent, and that contradiction is what makes the character work.
The rest of the cast does great work too. Dan Stevens ("The Rental", "Apostle") and Kathryn Newton ("Freaky", "The Devil's Mouth") already know their way around the genre, but my favorite was Kevin Durand, whom we saw recently in "Ready or Not: Here I Come", and who plays a tall, burly, powerful mercenary that the film paints as thoroughly dim. A large share of the comedy falls on him, and his moments are the most effective in the film.
There is a lot of violence and a lot of blood, and the effects are very well done, from the vampire makeup to the gore, which is plentiful and never looks cheap. There is also a lot of humor, and what's interesting is that it never feels forced, as it moves with the plot and with the moment it lands in. You might expect that much comedy to damage the atmosphere, but it doesn't, because the horror here doesn't come from being trapped in the house but from the sense that something powerful and violent is stalking each of them, and the comedy never interrupts that.
The only real complaint I have, and it may be a personal one given that this is my favorite creature, is how easily the vampires die. For beings as powerful as the film makes them out to be, they feel surprisingly easy to kill, to the point where at times they seem to go down with less effort than a human.
"Abigail" is a hugely entertaining vampire movie that understands its simple premise and exploits it with well-crafted gore, an outstanding child performance and comedy that adds rather than subtracts. Fans of "Ready or Not" and of darkly funny single-location horror will have a great time, while anyone looking for solemn vampire horror, or who can't stomach a lot of blood, won't find much here for them.
Rating: 8/10
Ending Explained (Spoilers ahead)
The film's big con is Valdez, the supposed right-hand man of Abigail's father who, according to the crew's rumors, is behind the killings. Valdez doesn't exist, and behind that name is Abigail herself. What the mercenaries believed was a well-planned kidnapping is actually how she and her father operate. He is Lazar, a centuries-old vampire living in modern times as a crime lord. They lure their enemies with a seemingly easy job, bring them to the mansion and lock them in with Abigail so she can take care of the rest.
By the end only Joey, Abigail and Frank are left. Frank has been turned into a vampire by then and wants to kill both Abigail and her father so he can take over the whole empire, and Joey along the way. Abigail proves much harder to kill than he expected, and between them she and Joey defeat him. That alliance doesn't come out of nowhere, since the film has been building it from the start. Joey carries the guilt of having abandoned her son, a wounded maternal instinct that has her protecting the girl even after she learns what Abigail is. Abigail, for her part, has been ignored by her father for a very long time and carries the reverse longing, the need to be loved. Each finds in the other what she's missing.
Shortly afterward the father arrives at the mansion, and in the conversation the film drops several hints that Lazar is Dracula, and that what we just watched is the story of Dracula's daughter. It never says so outright, but the implication is clear. Her father has no intention of letting anyone leave alive, and it's Abigail who stands up for Joey so she can go. Joey walks out of the house and the film ends there, with a monster's daughter choosing, for the first time, someone who treated her like a child.
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