Let’s talk a little about the movie Abigail.
If you’ve managed to avoid spoilers so far and you think it’s a kidnapping and ransom movie, it means you haven’t watched any of the trailers, so congratulations and all my respect to you. Not every studio can make a movie with such a cool plot twist and then decide to reveal everything in the teasers. It’s such a shame, actually… Because just hinting that a kidnapping went horribly wrong would have been invaluable for a story like this.
Babysitting gone wrong
“Abigail” is a 2024 horror movie that follows a group of criminals of varying skill levels. Their mission is to kidnap a 12-year-old ballerina, the daughter of a powerful figure in the local mafia. While waiting to receive the $50 million ransom, they must keep an eye on her for 24 hours. But not everything is as it seems, and from the first death onwards, the tone is set : they are babysitting a pocket-sized vampire who likes to play with her food.
The struggles are real
The film itself is unfortunately rather shallow once the initial, contrived surprise is revealed. The real highlights are the nods to other -better- movies in the genre, notably Sammy’s death, that echoes Ready or Not—which is to be expected since they’re by the same directors—and the pool of corpses reminiscent of ghost ship, to name just a couple…
That and the gore.
It sadly struggles to find its footing, fluctuating between excessive exposition, comedy, and the aforementioned gore in a somewhat haphazard way. It’s a shame because the concept could have been a fantastical comedy, if they had taken more inspiration from What We Do in the Shadows for instance. Instead, we’re left with an easily forgettable version of Tucker and Dale vs. Evil where absurdity trumps quality. The fact that Sammy confuses onions and garlic did get me, though. I might have snorted a little.
Gateway horror
The cast is top-notch, including Melissa Barrera, recently seen in Scream 5 and 6, Katherine Newton from Lisa Frankenstein and Freaky, Dan Stevens from The ritual : The Exorcism of Emma Schmidt, Giancarlo Esposito from Breaking Bad and Maxxxine, and especially Kevin Durand, who gets his own little joke because he asks for vampire references after having starred in The Strain for several years… which is a series about… vampires haha.
And the actress who plays Abigail is also fantastic. Kudos to her.
But I think the script shows its weaknesses the most, because while the acting is good, the location is magnificent, the lighting is well-balanced, there are too many unnecessary plot twists, the pacing isn’t steady, and it’s sadly, like many before it, a family-friendly film. I already mentioned this in relation to Megan, and I can’t really dismiss this type of formula because we were lucky enough to have Scream as a viable entry point into horror as teenagers. It was a perfectly proportioned and well-constructed gateway, but in recent years, gateways have proliferated to attract more and more teenagers to the horror genre, and by constantly duplicating formats, the quality of the creative work has been increasingly diminished. The drafts are noticeable, and the paint is crumbling.
The glaring plot hole & the dancing trend
And now that we’ve established that, the biggest hole in the script is glaringly obvious, isn’t it? If Lambert really wanted Abigail killed, why didn’t he take advantage of the fact that she was sedated? He had two opportunities. Not once, but twice and he didn’t make a move.
And that’s how we quickly see that paint by numbers movies don’t hold up in the long run.
It’s a shame they spoiled the plot in the trailers, but it wouldn’t have saved the ending anyway. Some scenes are nice, especially the dance parallel between Sammy and Abigail, but if I had to pay a euro for every dance scene in my horror movies over the last two years, I’d already have €3.
It’s not much, but it’s strange that it happened so many times.
My rating : 3,5/5 bats.
🦇🦇🦇 🩸 🩸
(Picture a half-eaten bat here, the emojis won’t let me do it)