Part heist movie, part vampire horror, ABIGAIL (2024) is a movie about a team of criminals recruited to kidnap a young girl for ransom, only to find out they kidnapped the last kid they should be messing with. It was overall pretty fun, though the filmmakers, as if they didn’t trust themselves or the audience, lean on the tropes so hard the whole thing feels a little tedious. Let me explain.
The movie starts with a team of criminals who don’t know each other and have been recruited by a mysterious figure to kidnap a rich man’s daughter for ransom and keep her in an old mansion until they receive further instructions. We don’t know their true names and little about their backgrounds, and they follow the heist movie tropes of being overly tough and constantly bickering and getting on each other’s nerves. The main protagonist is “Joey,” a military veteran and former drug addict trying to do right so she can get her son back. Melissa Barrera puts her heart into trying to make the audience care about Joey, though it’s all fairly generic; where she shines is when she interacts with the team’s other would-be leader, “Frank” (Dan Stevens), a self-serving ex-cop, alternately as an enemy and an ally. When they play off each other, it’s a lot of fun.
Once the twist is revealed (which is given in the trailer as it’s always the main hook, and it’s a great hook) things start to get rolling, but there’s a problem: The vampire is so powerful that the movie should be over in five minutes, despite her liking to play with her food. As a result, the screen time is padded with tropes used over and over, like the monster wasting time howling at instead of simply killing them, our heroes attacking the vampire one by one, yelling a loud war cry when they attack to let the vampire know they’re right behind her, the villain dancing and being gleeful as a way of expressing evil, and the villain throwing the hero across the room repeatedly instead of simply killing them.
Don’t get me wrong: There’s nothing wrong with a good trope. They’re staples of storytelling, and Hollywood relies on them. Tropes become tropes because audiences like them, and then over time audiences expect them, and woe to storytellers who flaunt expectations a bit too much. The problem I had with ABIGAIL is these tropes were all packed in and used over and over to the point of being tedious. In the last act, a few more twists are thrown in that don’t accomplish must other than to make it all feel even longer.
All that bitchiness aside–I am a jaded horror viewer, after all–ABIGAIL overall is pretty fun and doesn’t demand anything really of its viewers other than they chill out, sit back, and have a good time. There’s a lot of action, a little campiness, a cool location in the dilapidated mansion, plenty of gore, some twists, and a plucky heroine, elevating it from the usual horror B movie while planting it firmly among the pack. It’s a great movie for those times you really need a simple chicken soup horror film to watch. So be sure to check it out for yourself.
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