Abigail is just as good as the first two entries by the directing duo Radio Silence, which left its mark with Ready or Not and then spun the excellent Scream VI entry last year, and there’s a lot to be said for the way in which this movie compliments those in terms of tone, structure, and star power.
The big draw for this movie is the casting. This summer is the Danissance, because Dan Stevens who is in everything (Godzilla x Kong, Abigail, and Cuckoo in August with another Euphoria alum, Hunter Schafer). This movie serves as Angus Cloud’s final film appearance after a barnburner performance in two seasons of Euphoria and he has one of the best lines of the entire movie when he says in what must be absolutely improvised: “”It’s about to get accelerated in this bitch”. Melissa Barrera, who co-starred with the gothic It-Girl Jenna Ortega in Radio Silence’s Scream VI, returns after being unceremoniously kicked out of the Scream franchise for speaking out against the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza. Kathryn Newton, hot after Zelda Williams’s debut film Lisa Frankenstein, comes in guns ablazing. Beloved character actors Giancarlo Esposito (from Star Wars to Breaking Bad), Kevin Durand, and William Catlett (who I hadn’t seen before) all do fine and funny work in this vampire flick that didn’t quite have the teeth to bite into A24‘s most expensive and financially successful opening weekend ever.
Despite some decidedly meta restrictions against giving “backstories” by their boss, the first hour is mostly ensemble scenes where everyone can do some lightly jokey character work and let slip their backstories. It takes about an hour for the first death to occur, which is about forty five minutes longer than Friend and I had patience for, but the first death is actually quite a headfake (spoilers). From the endless parade of trailers, the audience is waiting for the moment when the ballerina vampire slips her restraints and starts biting people, but when Angus Cloud finally gets dragged into a dark place and decapitated, it’s completely unclear who is responsible. For all we know, Abigail is still very much so in her room and it appears there might be a second monster that’s invisible (?) and a member of organized crime (??) who wants to protect her. Such is the means of creating some tension in a trailer-weary audience.
In a lot of ways, I said before, this movie reminds me of the structure of Ready or Not, where the audience comes for the promise of The Most Dangerous Game, but Wedding, and stays for the She’s In On It plot twist–what I think of as the “false bottom plot.” Abigail teases the Ballerina Vampire Kills Unsuspecting Kidnappers, but before that Scene can even happen, we get two really cool story elements. First, Dan Stevens’s gruff Queen’s accent gets caught without his mask on by Abigail and extracts some juicy info about the mark’s father (a devious crime boss in the city), and second, the killings seem to be happening from a second source, what’s suggested is a Saw/Scream-like setup, where the killer is hidden among the crew (this is actually such an integral part of the Scream franchise that the kids in Scream VI unselfconsciously bring it up in almost every scene).
We then get (blessedly) an abridged version of the trailer, during which our main character, Melissa Barrera in an iconic scoop neck that she’ll don for the entire film, sits it out because she has a hunch that Abigail is unkillable or at least well beyond their abilities, and she is! Which leads to the next twist, that Abigail is actually in the vein of the Let Me In and Interview with a Vampire plots, an old soul trapped in an artificially young body, which allows her to drop F-bombs and also spout more complicated backstories for the remaining crew. The Outsmarted Crew plot becomes an Oh-Shit-How-Do-We-Escape plot, which feels very akin to Ready or Not, because of the way everyone creeps around an old manor with crossbows and shit, but also the chemistry between Dan Stevens and Melissa Barrera and the comic sluggishness of Kevin Durand buoys this sequence at every turn.
From there, the movie, much like Ready or Not, takes on a centrifugal force that spins and tumbles after the initial set up. In Ready or Not, the main character Grace becomes aware that there’s some sort of prophecy that says if the family is unable to commit a blood sacrifice by the end up the night they’ll all die, which sounds silly and delusional, but also includes this fun bit where her unreliable newlywed husband seems to be giving her chances to escape. So, we have this fantastical stop clock that toys with our underlying mechanics of the universe. In Abigail, the turning of people into vampires becomes the propulsive force of the second half of the film.
Much like Ready or Not, there are some especially satisfying bloody explosions that cake an entire study. There’s this intense hypnosis puppet-doll scene with a character that I’m really conflicted about and I think they might even deepfake Abigail’s face onto the actor while they’re being controlled, but it works really well and the actor gets to act as if they’re trying to be themselves and not Abigail which is even more intense, aside from the eye-rolling bloodrush of tasting for the first time. Everything about it works.
Abigail’s just as good as you’d hoped and just as silly as its predecessors. It’s a shame that it wasn’t able to break through the noise this week, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t absolutely pleasant viewing.
