One could be forgiven for thinking they’d wandered into the wrong theater when Abigail begins. A group of bumbling fools manage to pull it together long enough to follow a child ballerina, Abigail (Alisha Weir), back to her father’s estate, snatch her from her bed, and make a slick getaway back to their cool, calm, collected employer, Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito). In exchange for $7 million apiece, all they need to do is babysit the frightened Abigail in a different estate until Lambert negotiates with her father for a ransom. It sounds like easy money until Abigail, who seems like she’s forging a makeshift bond with one of her kidnappers, blurts out through tears, “I’m sorry for everything that’s going to happen to you.”
Right around then is when the rollercoaster that is Abigail starts its delirious, grisly descent into hell. That is, when it becomes abundantly clear that our dear sweet ballerina is a particularly ferocious breed of vampire that starts ripping our kidnapping crew to shreds, sloppily gobbling up their innards, then giddily pirouetting away to play with her food some more.
While there’s plenty to be said about Abigail’s impressively over-the-top scarlet mean streak, the hellride that the filmmakers take us on is all the more effective for the character groundwork laid prior. Happily choosing to get blissfully drunk, our ensemble—given ominous-in-retrospect Rat Pack aliases by Lambert—spends a fair bit of time getting brutally psychoanalyzed by ex-military doctor Joey (Melissa Barrera), with only ex-cop Frank (a scene-stealing Dan Stevens, busting out the best worst Boston seen on film since The Departed) able to fire back.
The crew are all affable idiots in their own way, especially barely cogent Dean (the late Angus Cloud), but when things start getting bloody, their specific idiocies end up making for not just some of the best laugh-out-loud moments of horrifying slapstick, but culminating in some of the most memorably violent ends in recent cine-memory. Kathryn Newton, in particular, is carving such a strange niche embodying unhinged monsters shaped like cute, blond final girls, and Abigail seems to delight in putting her through the wringer in particular. Not only does she get the most disgusting and horrifying moment in the film, but also the scene most likely to become its viral moment, with a thinly veiled, grisly, supernatural tip of the hat to 2023’s M3GAN.
That’s not to take anything away from Barrera. While she gets the less fun role of being the film’s moral compass, she brings a steely confidence and giant heart to the film that the story would be so much lesser without. She’s got to stand toe-to-toe with Dan Stevens devouring scenery the same way Abigail herself devours human throats, and that’s no small feat.
The linchpin, of course, is Abigail, and Weir delivers an impressive triple act of a performance, easily switching between vulnerable moppet, demonic killing machine, and tired, jilted immortal manipulating the puppets around her out of sheer boredom. The busy and convoluted climactic fight lets her down somewhat, but Weir remains a formidable presence throughout, and she’s all the more unsettling for the interpretive murder dances she busts out.
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