‘Abigail’ Review — Radio Silence’s Vampire Flick Is All Guts, No Glory

This review was originally part of our coverage for the 2024 Overlook Film Festival.

If there’s one vampire movie that’s poised to take the world by storm, it’s Radio Silence’s Abigail, the story of a sweet little ballerina hiding a monstrous facade underneath. The film is highly anticipated not just for fans of the Ready or Not directors, but for horror fans in general, as the duo behind the last two Scream films helm their very own Universal Monster movie. The new film, starring Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Kathryn Newton, and more joins a long legacy of monster movies, adding yet another vampire to a long and storied canon.

Anyone familiar with horror films knows that it’s beyond stupid to kidnap a monster — including the audience at Overlook Film Festival, where I attended the film’s world premiere — but that’s not the case for the crew of Abigail, who spirit the young ballerina (Alisha Weir) away to a country estate, in hopes of trading her for fifty million dollars. Naturally, things take a turn as fast as you can say Nosferatu, and there’s no shortage of twists and turns as the lights go out and bodies start to drop.

The film plays with a lot of subgenres — locked door mystery, slasher film, haunted house, alongside the obvious vampire story — that it almost seems like Radio Silence couldn’t decide what their favorite was and opted for a taster menu of everything. That works in its favor occasionally, especially since its monstrous little ballerina, surprisingly, takes up so little of its screen time. Turning such a zany cast of characters against each other House on Haunted Hill style is an inspired if oft-overused idea, especially considering the level of talent Universal managed to wrangle.

‘Abigail’s Crew Is Delightfully Quirky for a Horror Film

Kathryn Newton follows up her overlooked performance in Lisa Frankenstein as Sammy, the crew’s bimbo (I say that with affection) techie, tied with the late Angus Cloud for best comedic relief. (It’s devastating to know that we’ll never get more from the latter, and that we didn’t even get more from him in this specific film, hilarious as he is.) The two pair with Kevin Durand to make up the standard brainless half of the crew, while Barrera and Stevens make up the qualified serious side. Stevens is, naturally, as unhinged as ever as the ruthless and intelligent Frank, echoing bits of his performances in Legion and The Guest to spectacularly entertaining effect.

In fact, Abigail is at its best when it pits the Downton Abbey alum against Weir’s vampire, with both operating on a level of batshit the rest of the cast can only dream of. Neither has any qualms about biting into the material they’re given (pun intended) with relish, and it makes me grateful that Stevens has seemingly bypassed the traditional action hero/male lead career path in favor of playing what I can only describe as fucked up little guys with severe God complexes. Similarly, Radio Silence are at their best as directors when they lean hard into the gore of it all, imploding vampires like pop bottles someone stuck a pack of Mentos into.

Melissa Barrera Doesn’t Quite Reach Final Girl Status in ‘Abigail’

Barrera, unfortunately, is the only snag in the film’s otherwise pleasantly schlocky fabric. Her performance, compared to the rest of her castmates, is uninspired and flat, reminiscent more of a first read-through than a final film. From moment one, it’s obvious to the audience that she’s the Important Character, but not in any way that allows her to earn any amount of sympathy. She is simply there to be conventionally attractive and fill the final girl role, and doesn’t seem like she’s even interested in doing that, a hard one-eighty from her performance in Scream.

It’s entirely unsurprising where the story goes for her, which becomes all the more predictable given her rote “straight-man” routine. At least Stevens gets to go a little apeshit — she just passively snarks and acts above it all. She’s the robot in a crew of Roger Rabbit characters, reading out exposition and monologues with a stiffness that would make even C-3PO jealous. She has very little life to her, and I never fear for her even once over the course of the film in the way I mourn the other characters who find themselves being picked off one by one. If nothing else, her being thrown around like a ragdoll by the film’s vampires is a welcome respite from learning anything more about what’s already a cardboard cutout of a character.

2:16

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I’m not sure if it’s the Riverdale-adjacent Gen-Z style of acting or if I just keep watching movies with building block scripts that make for stories that don’t push the limits nearly as much as they could. There are points of Abigail that feel very much like paint-by-numbers horror, filled with exposition dumps that effectively took me out of the gooey, bloody narrative in their need to cut tension. It’s symptomatic of big-budget studio horror, which feels the need to hold the audience’s hand so they aren’t too scared at the end of everything.

To their credit, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett do their best with that limited narrative palette, and it does make me wonder if Stevens will become a frequent collaborator of theirs, given how much fun he seemed to be having soaked in fake blood. Their action sequences are perhaps the best and most entertaining of all the films I saw at Overlook, and I can’t disparage anyone too much when they’ve admitted to using a blood cannon to achieve their desired level of gore.

While their trademark meta-ness might not land in Abigail, for a Friday night popcorn movie, there’s a lot to enjoy, especially Weir, who makes such a sharp turn away from her role in Matilda that she nearly seems like an entirely different person — or vampire. For someone who’s usually never very impressed by child actors (which is nothing against any of them, to be fair), I walked out perhaps the most surprised by the young actress, who’s nearly as unhinged as Stevens, and might have reached that level, had she been given a bit more screen time to work with. Why a vampire movie features so little of its titular bloodsucker, I can’t be sure, but Weir is a solid addition to the canon of vampires — if nothing else, she gives little old Claudia a run for her money.

Abigail (2024)

REVIEW

Abigail is a vampire movie at its best when it leans into the gore and a delightful performance by Dan Stevens.

Pros

• The film’s comic relief, brought to life by Kathryn Newton and Angus Cloud, is effectively hilarious.
• Dan Stevens and Alisha Weir are each spectacular, proving to be the chaotic duo the film benefits most from.
• Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett craft some great action sequences that never skimp on the gore.

Cons

• Melissa Barrera doesn’t bring the same depth to her performance with the character ultimately falling flat.
• With a building block script, the film doesn’t push the limits nearly as much as it could.

Abigail is now available to stream on VOD in the U.S.

WATCH ON VOD