Radio Silence’s Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett cut their teeth making low-budget horror before their thoroughly impressive feature debut Ready or Not and then went on to reinvigorate the franchise model with Scream VI. Now, the filmmaking duo are re-doing the Universal classic Dracula’s Daughter and the results are satisfyingly bloody. Our Abigail review continues below.
For the group of kidnappers snatching the 12-year-old Abigail (Alisha Weir) after her ballet recital, stashing her away in an opulent mansion and awaiting the $50 million ransom on her head, it’s business as usual. All they have to do is babysit her for 24-hours and they each walk away with a $7 million payday. But when Abigail’s key handler Joey (Melissa Barrera) realises that this isn’t just any ordinary little girl but, in fact, a blood-sucking vampire hell-bent on revenge, the criminals are forced to work together to try to make it through the night.
Ready or Not showed Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s eye for creative, flashy violence while still being able to cultivate a sense of real dread as well as sharply observed sociopolitics and interesting character work. It’s a knack they carried into Scream VI too which managed to underpin the gleefully absurd twists and turns with genuine depth and menace. Abigail leans much more heavily into the silliness of its premise and has a lot of fun in doing so with Radio Silence bringing their playful wickedness to their most outrageous endeavour to date, offering a smattering of fun scares and buckets of bloodshed and gore galore.
It’s enjoyable popcorn fare, perhaps it’ll even go unrivalled as the horror blockbuster of the year, but what Abigail has in kills and thrills it lacks in narrative, thematic or emotional heft. Ready or Not scrutinised class warfare; Scream unpacked the lingering effects of trauma; Abigail is much more one-dimensional in its ideas. The narrative itself is predictable in its structure and its inevitable reveals and the script doesn’t do anything to reinvent the genre wheel. Ideas of familial abuse are half-baked, the plethora of reluctant criminals are thinly-sketched and there’s very little gratification in the justice the film so mawkishly delivers in its concluding moments. It all just kind of… ends.
That being said, the cast are game with Weir, Barrera and Dan Stevens on especially entertaining form and the third act does delivers nonstop spills as Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett see just how much gore they can get away with as the ridiculousness is pushed to its absolute breaking point. There are some fun set-pieces throughout and, on the promise of devilish vampire hijinks, there’s no denying that Abigail delivers a riotous time at the movies. But considering that Radio Silence has been at the forefront of reinventing horror tropes in recent years, it’s slightly disappointing that their latest lacks the same venomous bite its eponymous monster has.
Abigail review by Awais Irfan.
Abigail is released in cinemas from 19th April.
Abigail review
Summary
The cast is superb, and its lots of fun, but the feature, as a total package, lacks the same venomous bite its eponymous monster has.
