In their first raid out of the worldly concern of franchise filmmaking in five years , director Matt Bettinelli - Olpin and Tyler Gillett have deliveredAbigail . A blood - inebriate , mod - day riff on the oft - forget 1936 monster movieDracula ’s Daughter , the new cinema has more in common with its music director ’ 2019 prisonbreak horror hitReady or Notthan it does to their two most recent field day , 2022’sScream 5and 2023’sScream 6 . Its tone is , likeReady or Not , perfect black clowning , and its set bit are covered in just as much blood and guts as that Samara Weaving - led thriller about an unsuspicious bride who finds herself caught in the midsection of a loaded family ’s satanic rite .
This is , for the most part , a secure thing . scare off you to death has never been Bettinelli - Olpin and Gillett ’s capital strength , but they have always had a knack for sending up genre convention and tear up your brass with action sequences that are as playful as they are gruesome . InAbigail , the duo has done both of those matter and made a contemporary vampire movie that does n’t have much of a learning ability , but offers mass of bite .
Penned by Stephen Shields andReady or Notco - writer Guy Busick , Abigailsees Bettinelli - Olpin and Gillett return to the reality of individual - location revulsion . Its prologue follows Joey ( Melissa Barrera ) , who ’s both a recovering junkie with a sweet tooth and an absent female parent with a shamefaced moral sense , as she meets up with Frank ( Dan Stevens ) , Sammy ( Kathryn Newton ) , Rickles ( William Catlett ) , Peter ( Kevin Durand ) , and Dean ( the tardy Angus Cloud ) , the other members of a felonious crew assembled to snatch Abigail Lazar ( Alisha Weir ) , the young ballerina daughter of the powerful Kristof Lazar ( Matthew Goode ) . The film ’s opening minutes see its fundamental work party cleanly appropriate and channelise their target out from the base hit of her and her male parent ’s well - guarded base .
Once they ’ve arrived at their remote safe house , their genus Bos , Lambert ( an underused Giancarlo Esposito ) , takes the outlaw ’ phone and informs them that all they have to do is guard Weir ’s Abigail for the 24 hours it ’ll take to receive a multimillion - dollar bill ransom money from her Father-God . Tensions quickly flare between some of the squad ’s fellow member — namely , Barrera ’s Joey and Stevens ’ Frank — but it ’s only after one of them turn up dead thatAbigail‘s lead realize they ’re not , in fact , in the midst of take out off the greatest criminal offence of their liveliness . or else , they ’ve walked direct into a nightmare in which they ’re being systematically hound by Abigail , a seemingly immortal and invulnerable vampire .
Dean ’s relaxed attitude toward the whole office , which Cloud effortlessly portrays , allows space for a few wanton joke throughoutAbigail‘s first third , but it ’s only after Joey and company have realized that there ’s much more to their pre - adolescent prisoner than meets the eye that the film goes careening into the realm of full - burn out , screwball horror comedy . Its directors are more than well-situated working with the variety of heighten timber and textile thatAbigail‘s 2d bit fetch , but the celluloid ’s sudden tonal geological fault rest almost entirely on the specialty of Alisha Weir ’s delightfully acidulent turning as its eponymous little girl . Fortunately , Weir is more than up to the job . The young actress throw her whole body into the role and give a darkly funny , physically transformative performance that is befit of a movie as wittingly silly and cartoonishly violent asAbigail .
The film ’s cast fellow member all prove that they very much understand the assigning they ’ve been given , and none more so than Stevens . TheGodzilla x Kongactor , who has work up a career giving oversized performance that should n’t work virtually as well as they do , almost steals the show inAbigailwith his hammy , frequently hilarious performance as Frank , a dirtbag with an ego big enough to make him consider he can outsmart a centuries - old vampire . Newton and Durand also stand out as Sammy and Peter , two members of Frank ’s bunch who emerge as both more and less capable than they seem . As was the case inReady or Not , Bettinelli - Olpin and Gillett efficaciously mine just as much comedy out of the exasperated reactions betweenAbigail‘s core characters as they do its bit of head - exploding fierceness .
The manager make the most out ofAbigail‘s elemental location , a spooky countryside mansion that turns out to have more than a few horrors hidden beneath ( and behind ) its grand outside . The film itself is n’t quite as breadbasket - churningly acute as its Almighty ’ twoScream movies , but it does gas moment of grotesque , gothic knockout , like one character ’s macabre centre dance with a headless body . The imaging and visual artistry of these import makeAbigailfeel , in many ways , like a stylistic step up for Gillett and Bettinelli - Olpin .
While Shields and Busick ’s script gives each of the film ’s characters private life and personality that make its darkly funny fib shine burnished , it also rely on multiple ungainly exposition garbage dump design to retroactively explain several major plot of ground twists . time in at 109 min , Abigailsticks around 15 minute longer than it should as well , and it overcomplicates its culmination with a serial of left over turns that do n’t make your backtalk drop so much as they make you squint your eye in confusion . The motion picture ’s specific make of revulsion funniness involve that it find the right-hand balance between tongue - in - cheek cleverness and outright fatuousness . For most of its runtime , Abigaildoes just that , but it lose its terms a petty in its final 20 arcminute .
As similar toReady or Notas it is , Abigaillacks the extra bound of feminine craze that lifted its predecessor up to dandy height . The moving-picture show seek to take its de facto lead , Barrera ’s Joey , on a similar operose journey to the one Weaving ’s Grace endures inReady or Not . However , the character is too roughly define and Barrera is too muted of a performing artist for the law of similarity between Joey and Claire ’s story to take on any dandy meaning . Even by its film director ’ standards , Abigailis a decidedly superficial celluloid , and that turn back it short of leaving any lasting marks . It does successfully sink its tooth into you on more than one occasion , though , and the fun it has while doing so is just as infective as any lamia bite .
Abigailis now playing in theatre .
