Times are good for directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who, along with producer Chad Villella, make up the filmmaking collective Radio Silence. Since their segments in the V/H/S movies and Southbound, the team has broken through with Ready or Not and the last two Scream movies. And here they go again with their newest fright flick Abigail.
Abigail is about a crack group of criminals who are tasked with kidnapping a young ballerina, the titular Abigail (Alisha Weir from Wicked Little Letters), and holding her for ransom. They make it to their holding location, a deserted mansion, and just need to keep her there for 24 hours until her father pays up. Unfortunately for them, they have no idea who – or what – they have just kidnapped.
It’s not much of a spoiler to say that, yes, Abigail is a vampire. Now, vampire movies are second only to zombie movies on the staleness scale, but what Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett have done is admirable. Working from a script by Stephen Shields (The Hole in the Ground) and Guy Busick (who also helped write Ready or Not and the Scream movies for the Radio Silence boys), the filmmakers have created an entirely new type of vampire movie. Abigail reinforces the vampire tropes while still managing to subvert them.
The movie starts almost like a Reservoir Dogs type of a heist movie, with six team members who have never met (and are given Rat Pack code names) each working their specialty to pull off the caper that will make them rich beyond their wildest dreams. Once things go awry and they get locked inside the mansion, it becomes a slasher movie, with the characters being picked off one by one by an unknown enemy. And once the stalker’s identity is revealed, things get crazy.
And don’t worry – this is all pretty much first-act stuff. This isn’t spoiling anything. There are tons of cool surprises in Abigail.
Abigail seems a bit like a spiritual soulmate to Ready or Not. The whole point of the game is to survive the night. Only, instead of a bunch of people hunting one victim, one hunter is tracking down multiple prey. Things get just as bloody, though. Radio Silence does have a type, and it’s a type that they do well.
There’s a mystery surrounding the entire cast of characters. Since no one really knows anyone else, there’s an air of mistrust and suspicion that stinks up the whole situation. This paranoia just adds to the intrigue once the bodies start piling up – is it really this little girl doing all this killing? Or is one of the Rat Packers in on it? Or is it someone else entirely?
The ensemble cast of ragtag criminals, which includes Scream’s Melissa Barrera, The Guest‘s Dan Stevens, Kathryn Newton from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Lost’s Kevin Durand, William Catlett from Lovecraft Country, and Euphoria’s Angus Cloud, is terrific. Each has a different backstory with flaws and vulnerabilities, and this makes the reveals of the characters both compelling and satisfying. No one is super layered, but there’s a reason these six are put together, and finding that out is part of the fun of Abigail. Most of them feel like more than just fodder for the monster.
And then, there’s Abigail herself. As a villain, she’s perfect. She alternates between being the sweet, timid little kidnap victim and the vicious monster who wants to rip out her captors’ throats. She’s a master manipulator – cunning and ruthless, both wholesome and animalistic. And willing to leave a trail of bodies in her wake.
As a horror movie, Abigail sticks pretty close to the Radio Silence motif of suspense-over-jump scares. The shock factor in the movie is provided by its sheer brutality and graphic violence. And buckets of blood. There are no cat scares in Abigail (although there is one rat scare), just a whole lot of gooey carnage. But it is more subtle than your average gore-fest. It’s just a cruel and mean-spirited movie. And it works that way.
Abigail is a breath of fresh air, both for vampire movies and for modern horror in general. It’s also self-aware enough to realize this, with references to both ancient vampire myths and Twilight. In short, it’s a Radio Silence vampire movie. Next up for the collective is a requel/re-imagining of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, but Radio Silence is known for pulling rabbits out of hats. The horror world will be watching.
GRADE: B
MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, gore, brief drug use, and strong bloody violence
Release Date: April 19, 2024
Running Time: 1 hour 49 minutes
Studio: Universal Studios
