Abigail

Abigail Movie Review Rating:

Star Cast: Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Alisha Weir, William Catlett, Kathryn Newton, Kevin Durand, Angus Cloud and Giancarlo Esposito

Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

What’s Good: The movie has a couple of moments where the blood and gore are so over-the-top that you cannot help but laugh at the insanity.

What’s Bad: The script doesn’t do any justice to the characters, and they are all quite superficial, which makes it hard to connect with or care about them.

Loo Break: The first half of the movie spends too much time introducing the characters, but nothing is meaningful enough to not warrant a skip.

Watch or Not?: Watch only if you are in the mood for some gory stuff. Other than that, Abigail is quite forgettable.

Language: English

Available On: Theatrical release

Runtime: 109 Minutes

User Rating:

The vampire genre was once upon a time flourishing with all kinds of new films, books, and TV shows, but lately, the bloodthirsty creatures of the night have been in a bit of a slumber, as horror films try to create new mythologies to make them feel unique and interesting. Abigail, the new horror film directed by the duo from Radio Silence, instead goes back to the basics of vampire horror and introduces a fun premise with edgy dialogue and a good dose of old-fashioned gore.

Abigail Movie Review: Script Analysis

At the start, Abigail presents itself as a very classic heist movie, with several criminals coming together and forming a crew to kidnap the daughter of a very important businessman. However, things don’t go the way they plan, and the target of the kidnapping ends up being something a lot more dangerous than just a twelve-year-old girl that loves ballet, and she is actually a vampire and the criminals become her new victims. This premise propels the movie from beginning to end, even if it stumbles a bit throughout its runtime. 

The dialogue initially catches your attention, not because it is bad, but because the tone doesn’t really fit the genre, and it is due to this difference in tone that the film extracts most of its comedic elements. The characters in the film believe that they are part of a gritty crime story, and they act all tough. However, when they realize that they are actually in a horror film, things become quite funny at times, as most of the jokes and observations are a hit or a miss.

The weakest part of the film is the characters themselves, which is not a big surprise for this genre. It is expected that many characters introduced at the start of the movie will end up in a body bag by the end of the movie. So, the writers don’t believe there is any reason to go deep into their motivations. Doing so would have had more impact on each death, but this does not happen in this film.

The characters are also placed in cliched situations. All betrayals and alliances can be seen from miles away without surprises or twists. This makes the film boring at times, especially in the beginning when the movie is trying to set up the entire situation that will place the characters in the hands of the little vampire girl.

Abigail Movie Review: Star Performance

Melissa Barrera has already proven that she is a fantastic actor, and here in Abigail, she excels in her abilities with solid effort. Sadly, just like the rest of the characters, there is nothing really memorable about her role, and so, not even her charisma and acting abilities can raise the bar for the movie. Dan Stevens also does great, and he might be the most interesting character, but sadly, the movie takes him in a more clichéd direction, and we are left with just the basics once again.

The rest of the cast does well, but their characters are even thinner than Barrera’s and Steven’s, so there is little to talk about their performances other than the fact that we have seen these actors play the exact same roles in other projects. Angus Cloud appears in the movie playing a more annoying version of his Euphoria character, Fez, and as his last on-screen performance, it is a bit sad and underwhelming.