Joey (Melissa Barrera), though that is her code name, is one of a handful of thieves who were tasked with kidnapping a young girl, Abigail (Alisha Weir), and transporting her to a mansion where they will hold the girl until her influential father pays a massive sum to Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito), the mastermind behind this whole scheme.  As the night ticks slowly by, suspicion erupts between Joey and Frank (Dan Stevens) causing a rift in the group, but those tensions are quickly put on hold when Abigail proves she is not just any little girl but something much darker and stronger than any of the thieves were prepared for. 

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett reteam to direct Abigail, a horror comedy penned by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick for Universal Pictures.  It premiered at the Overlook Film Festival ahead of its theatrical release, and while featuring all of the hallmarks of the Radio Silence brand, the 109-minute film can sometimes feel a bit more like an echo of an idea than something wholly original by the team that can normally blend pop sensibilities with horror tropes rather adeptly.  Despite feeling like a reprise of themselves, Abigail is still an enjoyable experience that manages to thrill audiences who will be easily hooked by the engaging premise and strong opening act. 

The actual heist of the film is over within mere minutes after opening; Joey and the team follow Abigail’s car on her way home from ballet practice where they steal her from her room and take her to the holding house.  Dean (Angus Cloud) drives one of the vehicles while Sammy (Kathryn Newton) hacks the cameras and security system so Peter (Kevin Durand) and Rickles (William Catlett), the muscle of the group, can grab their target and flee the scene.  Once locked in for the night by Lambert – who also confiscated their cell phones – the crew are left to their own devices to wait out the night until dawn when surely, Abigail’s father would have paid the ransom. 

The major scene in this opening act is led by Joey who plays a bit of a parlor trick, boasting how she can read people and goes around the room divulging bits and pieces of their past for money.  It is a fun way to play with the exposition of introducing the ensemble cast to the audience in a way that does not rely on voice-over, and it immediately sets the stage for the dramatic tension between them all as despite working together to pull off the heist, no one really trusts the other as; after all, how much can you really trust a thief?  The big problem here, and like many large ensemble horror films where the characters exist for the sole purpose of being disposed of later on, is that the fringe characters are exceptionally uninteresting.  Barrera and Stevens share some good antagonistic chemistry, but Cloud, in his final role, is reduced to a thankless part. Newton grows into her character as Sammy but only when the padding of the rest of the ensemble has been thinned down which is more than can be said about Catlett’s Rickles who is largely ignored until quickly dispatched with. Then there is Durand who appears to be doing his best Patrick Warburton impression and he was – admittedly amusingly – stylized to look like Elon Musk and written to be as dumb and dense as a doornail but he uses this style choice to really interject some humor into the narrative.  The turning point into the second act occurs when it comes out that Joey has removed Abigail’s blindfold and rearranged her restraints, a revelation only known because Frank broke the rule that only Joey was to have any contact with the girl, things begin to get interesting as the already suspicious group is catapulted into pure paranoia.  The film does not keep up this backstabbing pattern, and it is not meant to, but it does mark some of the more effective and engrossing scenes of the film before transitioning into a more bloody affair. 

That brings us to Abigail, the victim of the film’s marketing campaign which was quick to divulge that she is, indeed, not like other girls. She is a vampire ballerina.  This reveal is treated with all the gravitas of an early-era Shalamyn twist, though it occurs at the halfway point instead of the final moments, and it should have been so much more effective of a reveal than it actually is.  We are in an odd place with films now where the trailers and marketing need to spell out so much for an audience, where Twitter and fan pages are abuzz with every leaked detail and behind-the-scenes photo snapped from half a mile away.  It is as if audiences do not want to be surprised anymore, as if they want to treat their ticket – those few who even elect to see a film in theatres anymore – as a prescription where they will already know what is lurking in the shadows and behind the door before they even select their seat.  Because of this, even audiences that have avoided actively seeking out the marketing materials, but are still subject to them by absorption through osmosis as part of the cinema-going ritual through trailers playing in the lobby or posters and standees in the hallways, will enter the film with far more knowledge than the characters for much of the runtime, and there is no fun in having the upper hand right out of the gate and for so long. Now, to be fair to the filmmakers, if one can somehow stumble into this film blindly, they do a very good job at hiding this reveal until they are ready, and playing the film back while trying to suppress that outside knowledge does prove a pretty impressive amount of restraint on their behalf to hold that reveal close to the chest for as long as they do as they sow the seeds of unease in the narrative, it is just a shame that capitalism has continued to drive the knife deeper into the heart of art.   

It is actually pretty wild at how much they sneak into the film that this is not just a grab-and-go scheme, but something more ulteriorly orchestrated.  The first bit of doubt comes when Lambert explains what the individual payout will be against the random sum leaving him, the Frank Ocean of the group, pulling the smallest sum.  It is this continued pattern of details that just do not add up that the careful viewer will click, but it is not until much later that it makes sense why this is.  It was all a setup, Abigail is not the victim of a kidnapping but bait in a trap set to ensnare those who have crossed her father.  She reveals the twisted web, how each of them have crossed her family – and we also get a sense of how accurate Joey’s observations were – and we again have an interesting film until it devolves back into a blood-soaked mess.  Great for those who want it, but it becomes a slog when compared to the swatches of the film where the characters are more interested in each other and the threat of Abigail is more of a looming fear than an outright predator.  The reason for this is because Abigail is a rather uninspired monster, especially in the wake of last year’s M3GAN (2023) and against the long lineage of creepy kids in horror.  The juxtaposition of a little girl in her tutu being a savage, bloodthirsty vampire gives us an initial chuckle, but as she pirouettes to Swan Lake, we are reminded of Black Swan (2010) and from there we see just how derivative the film is, not only within the context of the genre but within Radio Silence’s own filmography.  The team pivots away from Abigail in the final act as if they realized they milked the concept dry, but instead of wrapping things up on a high note, they bog the film down with so much extra material that it limps along with less life than the bodies strewn about the mansion. Couple this with the really just blunt, broad sweeping vampiric language that Weir is saddled with delivering, the big capstone of the film fails to excite or inspire despite the promising leadup.