Ever since Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson made the jump from gross-out horror comedies to gigantic, crowd-pleasing blockbusters, there has been a sense that Hollywood views up-and-coming genre filmmakers as a sort of farm team for big-budget commercial fare. This is, of course, generally depressing; for every Greta Gerwig’s Barbie there’s an Adam Wingard’s Death Note or a Chloe Zhao’s Eternals, films which seemingly extinguish everything that made the director’s early, hungry work so exciting. While it’s always nice to see someone get rewarded for their work with a higher-paying gig, it’s hard not to view this method as a sort of moviemaking catch-and-kill.
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the directing partnership known professionally as Radio Silence, burst onto the scene in 2019 with the twisty-turny horror comedy Ready or Not. I adored that film’s combination of Haunted Mansion ambience and eat-the-rich satire, and was very excited to see what the duo would do next. All too predictably, that turned out to be the Scream franchise, and while Radio Silence’s back-to-back entries were decent (I quite liked the first one; the second was fine, but fell into the classic Scream sequel trap of running out of genre cliches on which to comment), it was hard not to wish for a proper follow-up to their breakthrough. Thankfully, the pair dodged the bullet that became Scream’s ill-fated seventh installment and are back on their home turf. Their new film, Abigail, while lacking some of the punch of Ready or Not, feels much more like a successor to that film than either of the team’s last two films. It’s good to have them back.
Abigail begins as a fairly straightforward heist picture. A team of criminals are dispatched by the ever-shadowy Giancarlo Esposito to kidnap the titular eleven-year-old ballerina and hold her overnight in a big, spooky mansion. They don’t know who she is, but they are assured that her father is powerful enough to furnish the $50 million for her return. They also don’t know anything about each other beyond their Rat Pack-themed pseudonyms: Dan Stevens’ tough-talking leader is “Frank,” Angus Cloud’s marble-mouthed wheel-man is “Dean,” Kathryn Newton’s valley-girl hacker is “Sammy,” and so forth. Our heroine is “Joey,” played by fellow Scream 7 refugee Melissa Barrera, the designated handler of their young charge (this has to count as the greatest compliment paid to Joey Bishop in over half a century). The more Joey makes small talk with young Abigail, however, the more she begins to suspect that their little pack has been led directly into a trap. Ordinarily this is the part where I’d play coy about spoilers, but since the trailers are pretty open about the film’s hook: Abigail is a pint-sized vampire, and our band of thieves need to find a way out of the house with all their blood still inside their bodies.
Even though two films separate Abigail from Ready or Not, they feel very much of a piece. Both take place in similarly cobwebbed manors, and both are suffused with a rich, oaken glow seemingly designed for Halloween-season viewing. It’s not really “scary” so much as “spooky,” offering the same sort of sensory pleasures as a stroll through Spirit Halloween or a bag of gummy body parts. Now that the Radio Silence boys are relieved of their roles as custodians of the legacies of Wes Craven and Kevin J. Williamson we can begin to determine their own voice and modus operandi, and as an avowed mark for this sort of thing I couldn’t be happier.
The most obvious selling point of Abigail is, of course, its central monster, pirouetting daintily through a series of outrageous bloodbaths. Truth be told, I found most of Abigail’s dance sequences a little forced (though I will admit to grinning through a scene in which she twirls to a late-period Danzig song, which is exactly the sort of unabashedly stupid spectacle for which I am a complete sucker). But Abigail herself, as played by Matilda: The Musical’s Alisha Weir, is a delight. Abigail’s screenplay is wordy enough that it might have been pure hell in the hands of a lesser child actor, but Weir handles the material with an impressively sure hand, dancing her way through verbose monologues as nimbly as her recitals of Swan Lake. Abigail leaves itself open to a sequel (because that’s the world we live in at the moment), but I’m just as excited to see what other roles Weir has in her.
Likewise, much of the joy of Abigail comes from watching its actors bouncing off each other. Unsurprisingly to genre fans, Stevens is the standout here, playing the ever-irritated straightman with an entertainingly broad Queens accent. Newton, for the second time this year, proves her bonafides as a rising comedic scream queen, and Kevin Durand is a hoot as the lunkheaded Quebecois muscle (as for Cloud: I don’t want to speak ill of the Euphoria star in light of his tragic death mere weeks after filming, so instead I will simply say that the ensemble hits its stride after his character’s departure). All of these characters, of course, are completely out of their depth, and watching them struggle to keep pace with their supernatural adversary is a delight. It also helps that the filmmakers largely resist the temptation to let their actors riff and supply them with actual jokes– increasingly not a given in the modern studio comedy landscape.
Abigail suffers a bit in comparison to Ready or Not; it lacks that film’s deliciously unsubtle class commentary, and Barrera’s emotional arc feels somewhat thin and tacked-on (particularly in comparison to Ready or Not’s Samara Weaving, a cornerstone of the “Good for Her” canon). But it’s still a terrifically entertaining night at the movies– as vampire-themed crime comedies go, it’s certainly yards better than last year’s Renfield– and it feels like a step in the right direction. For the first time in what feels like ages, a pair of promising filmmakers have stepped back from the brink of corporate homogeneity and gone back to the sort of inventiveness on which they made their name. In a year in which superhero and franchise films are taking a strike-induced time out, it finally looks like original stories have room to reclaim some ground. If this is what the future of summer blockbusters looks like, I for one welcome our tiny, bloodsucking overlords.
Abigail
2024
dir. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett
109 min.
Opens Friday, 4/19 in theaters everywhere
