How to describe Abigail without ruining it?
It starts out looking very much like a heist thriller, except it’s not money the gang in question is trying to lift, but a young girl called Abigail, the daughter of a very rich man, we later learn, who is expected to pay out $50 million to get her back.
The gang all have aliases – Frank, Sammy, Joey, Peter, Dean and Rickles, the Rat Pack in other words, which gives everything a Tarantino-esque flavour. And Reservoir Dogs slight return is seemingly what’s on the cards once the gang successfully kidnap Abigail and wind up back at the big old mansion. Here it looks like they are going to bicker and fall out after the guy who hired them (Giancarlo Esposito) forces them to spend a night together in each other’s company.
A bunch of strangers thrown together by circumstance in a gloomy old house – Agatha Christie is in the building, it seems – and there is mention of And Then There Were None, her classic and much-adapted “who’s going to get it next?” thriller.
And then it shifts again, decisively this time, into its destination genre: supernatural horror most vivid, most bloody, most over the top, and which pushes the “you messed with the wrong guy” logic of the film to its end point.
What sort of horror it is I’m not going to say. But it is vastly entertaining and comes with moments of mad, fountaining, explosive gore so excessive it’s funny. There is humour from other directions, moments of comedy springing from the way characters interact rather than the rhythms of set-up and pay-off gag-writing.
Melissa Barrera probably thinks she’s the star, and she is the central character holding things together, as Joey, a single mother who’s abandoned her own child and who is prompted to reconsider the whole gang/kidnap thing once she forms a bond with Abigail. Joey is the final girl, which means a low cut top and a scream-queen expression on Barrera’s face.

Dan Stevens may also think he’s the star, since he’s probably the best known of this group of actors – and he’s playing Frank (Sinatra having been the leader of this particular pack). Whereas Will Catlett (Rickles), Kathryn Newton (Sammy), Kevin Durand (Peter) and Angus Cloud (Dean) all know their characters are likely to be heading into infinity before the curtain comes down. The actor too, in the case of Cloud, who died aged only 25 before the film had wrapped. You might know him from the show Euphoria – he’s playing the same sort of holy stoner fool here, and brilliantly. What a waste of talent.
In fact the star is Alisha Weir as Abigail, who is as good playing the determined little kid who loves her ballet as she is as the frightened child who doesn’t know what’s going to happen to her, and even better once the reveal comes and she gives the expression child abuse a reverse thrust – in this movie it’s the child doing the abusing.
Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett know what they’re doing, having directed a couple of Scream movies, one of the sections of the compendium horror V/H/S and Ready or Not, which was similarly gorey and was also inflected by Agatha Christie. They seem to be enjoying getting Guy Busick and Christopher Murphy’s inventive, idea-filled screenplay onto the screen – the house is all crackling fires and wind-up gramophones – and they really get stuck into the set pieces, like the protracted scene when extensive bloodletting and death comes to the soundtrack of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. John Woo may also be in the builiding.
By the end it’s not only genre expectations that have been shattered but our sympathies. Who is the bad guy here? New ones keep turning up, usually announced by more blood-letting, until eventually Abigail’s father, played by Matthew Goode, turns up to signal that it’s time for the fun to end, to the accompaniment of yet more gore.
Abigail – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024