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Abigail Movie Review

Abigail is a 2024 horror film directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and starring Melissa Barrera, Alisha Weir and Dan Stevens. It’s such a silly, but fun movie.

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“What can I say? I like playing with my food“

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A group of would-be criminals kidnaps the 12-year-old daughter of a powerful underworld figure. Holding her for ransom in an isolated mansion, their plan starts to unravel when they discover their young captive is actually a bloodthirsty vampire. Made by the directors of ‘Ready or Not’, this is not quite up to par with that amusing flick, but it’s still so damn entertaining that it’s worth seeing for the fun factor alone.

I hate that this movie was spoiled to me by the marketing team. Why the hell did they spoil the major plot twist that happens only halfway through in the premise alone? That ruined the enjoyment of the movie for me. Still, I appreciated the originality of this film that was clearly a riff on ‘The Usual Suspects’, but with the added horror elements, which in this case were vampires. It’s an oddly satisfactory mix that mostly worked.

The first half of the movie is basically a crime thriller that felt familiar, though it was well executed and very well performed. But it went on for too long, which muted the overall impact of that section. But the second half twisted everything on its head with that vampire addition, which eventually led to even more twists and turns. Not all of them worked (the Dan Stevens development toward the end was way too silly), but undeniably the ending was excellent. The arrival of Dracula himself was quite cool and the final line spoken by the protagonist was hilarious.

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This is the first big role for Melissa Barrera after she was kicked out of the ‘Scream’ franchise just for stating the obvious about the Israeli genocide that is going on right now. Thus, it was great that she got this terrific gig and a movie that was so well received by both audiences and critics. She’s excellent in a film that is clearly hers. Joey is a cool antihero/heroine that got a solid backstory and her maternal relationship with this girl is definitely familiar territory, but it was still very well done and it worked.

Apart from Barrera, the other two standouts are Dan Stevens and Alisha Weir. I did not love what they did with his character in the third act, but otherwise Stevens was so memorably creepy and competent in what turned out to be a big villain role. As for Weir, she delivered one of the best child actor performances in quite a while. She was particularly strong when she was taunting the crew. She was thoroughly believable as both the scary vampire and this regular girl who has some daddy issues.

Kathryn Newton is quite a lot of fun and Angus Cloud was so well cast in what was sadly his final film performance. Giancarlo Esposito was solid too, but barely utilized, which was disappointing given his caliber. Most of these secondary players were only just okay as the movie clearly favored the above three characters to a large degree.

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Abigail isn’t scary at all. Its vampire elements are also quite standard. But the scenes where they were pitted against this dangerous vampire child were still so much fun as they were deliciously over-the-top. I loved the movie’s on-the-nose modern dialogue and the humor was at times very effective, though I wished to have seen even more of it. The third act is beyond messy, but it was also very enjoyable in its juicy and trashy twists and turns. It’s not a movie for everyone, but if you’re in the right frame of mind, it will pass the time well.