ABIGAIL - Mark Reviews Movies

Abigail, Universal Pictures

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | April 18, 2024

Abigail takes about half of its run time to reveal the gimmick. It's a good one, which initially sees a group of kidnappers looking for the potential threat outside the old mansion where they're hiding. As is so often the case in a horror story, the real danger lurks within the house.

This puts one in a precarious position. How much of the premise can be detailed in a review, especially when the advertising appears to go out of its way to tell everyone what's really happening in the story? The whole thing demands some sense of surprise, and it's obvious screenwriters Stephen Shields and Guy Busick have structured their tale in such a way to highlight the mystery of its setup, its characters, and the slow build toward one moment when someone loses his head and another in which we discover how that happened.

Honestly, filmmakers should fight harder against a studio's marketing department going out of its way to ruin the biggest reveal of a story. That's particularly true of a movie like this one, which gives the advertising folks multiple angles from which to approach and sell the material without giving away something that's intentionally kept a secret for almost an hour. They may not respect the twist of this story and how the filmmakers distract and misdirect our attention from it, but this review will try to.

We first meet a team of six criminals, all of them doing their part to abduct a 12-year-old girl, the daughter of an unknown but considerably wealthy man. They're all given nicknames after completing the first stage of the job. Joey (Melissa Barrera) will be the only one who communicates with Abigail (Alisha Weir), the girl who's nabbed from her bedroom and drugged into unconsciousness after a lonely ballet performance in an empty auditorium.

Frank (Dan Stevens) is the resident tough guy, although Peter (Kevin Durand) is obviously the muscle of the operation. Sammy (Kathryn Newton) is the tech whiz, who at least gives her crewmembers a skeptical look when they ask if she can hack a locked gate (until the screenplay decides that, yes, she actually can, somehow), and Dean (the late Angus Cloud) is the getaway driver. Finally, Rickles (Willam Catlett) is the only one other than Joey who has some doubts about abducting a pre-teen girl, some suspicions about the rest of the crew who seem fine with the idea, and some concern that maybe being holed up in an out-of-the-way manor isn't as safe as their fellow criminals assume.

The script is clever in how it reveals what matters about these characters (Joey knows how to read people, and her fellow crooks are eager to bet money she can't read them), even though it won't come as much of a surprise to learn that the number is cut down from six to fewer at some point in the second act. As far as the team knows, they're just waiting for Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito), the man who came up with the plan and hired the crew, to demand a ransom from Abigail's father. Until the money shows up, their part of the scheme amounts to glorified babysitting.

Gradually, they figure out that something is terribly amiss. Abigail reveals the identity of her father, a notorious crime lord whose hitmen are capable of pulling off seemingly impossible murders. The locked gate is one obstacle, but some heavy wooden shutters cover up the windows, too. When one of the criminals winds up dead, the surviving crew decides that the father or at least one of his assassins is in the house with them.

Let's stop there with the setup, which is appropriately enigmatic and bolstered by some knowing performances, especially from Stevens as a guy whose tough persona is more of a put-on and Newton as the spoiled kid of well-to-do parents who got into hacking for the fun of it. Barrera is a fairly sympathetic figure among the morally compromised crowd. She plays a former Army medic who was injured, became addicted to morphine, and is in recovery so she can be a good mother to her son.

As those impossible murders orchestrated by the father suggest, the big twist here is of the supernatural variety, and just as the screenwriters and directors (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett) play with the apparent importance and basic competency of the criminal crew, they have some fun toying with the lore of its main monster. The survivors have to figure out what they know from movies and books and legends about such a creature (Durand gets a good laugh from Peter announcing what he knows: "that they don't exist"). Most of it isn't helpful, which adds some wicked humor to their initial assault, but obviously, the stuff that would work for sure does help—often exactly at the last possible moment, which isn't nearly as funny.

Once the threat is revealed, Abigail mainly struggles to surprise (The standoff becomes repetitive) and to contrive just how this tale doesn't end immediately (The idea of the creature playing with its food is a decent joke but a lazy justification). It's generally amusing, occasionally bloody, and intrinsically subversive stuff, to be sure, but in spending so much time building to the central gimmick, the filmmakers only reveal how few ideas they have in doing something genuinely different with it.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products