Abigail

dirs: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillet

2024

Abigail is a ‘perfect’ action-y horror-ish flick to watch on a Saturday night after the better part of a six-pack has been consumed. For some people a six-pack will have them giggling like idiots, and for others a six-pack consumed means you’re barely getting started.

I’m not here to argue the merits of alcoholism and such, but I will make the (weak) case for Abigail being a reasonably well done movie of whatever genre it is.

I think it’s impossible to spoil a movie whose poster and ads spoil everything to do with the so-called movie. I’ve seen ads on tv, and if audiences didn’t figure out from that what was going on, they’re probably still going to be confused after they watch the flick.

“wait, so, she’s a mermaid?” they’ll probably ask the person next to them, tapping them on the shoulder, who will recoil and growl “don’t touch me, nothing gives you that right!”

A bunch of professional crims are enlisted for a job. They don’t know each other, but they are competent and do what needs to be done, not knowing until the last moments that they’ve been enlisted to kidnap a young girl who dresses as a ballerina.

She is the Abigail of the title (Alisha Weir). One of the crims, later to be dubbed Joey (Melissa Barrera) enquires as to her wellbeing, and promises her, despite all appearances to the contrary, that she won’t let anything bad happen to Abigail, well, anything worse than being kidnapped and chained up.

Abigail apologises to Joey for everything that’s about to happen.

Hmm. Does she know something that we don’t?

Well, the whole movie is named after her, so she probably is in the know.

The guy that hired them, Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito, wasted in a thankless role), tells them not to tell each other any personal details, so he gives all six of the crims names from the Rat Pack, which turns out to be so pointless. I mean, wonderful history lesson for the kids, but…

I mentioned Joey, so there’s also Dean the driver (Angus Cloud), Frank the…abrasive jerk (Dan Stevens), Sammy the tech person (Australia’s Own Kathryn Newton), an ex-military guy (Will Catlett) and a large Quebecois guy who’s there probably for tax reasons (Kevin Durant).

Don’t do it, don’t get attached to any of them. This is that kind of flick, where they are whittled away one by one, until And Then There Were None (to quote the Agatha Christie book that’s mentioned 15 times at least).

It is really sad seeing Angus Cloud here, in what will be his final role since he died last year. He’s a very young man who decided he wanted to look like Mac Miller and, unfortunately, died just like Mac Miller, from a combination of drugs so different from each other that you wonder how many demons he was wrestling with. Most famous for playing a sympathetic drug dealer on Euphoria, while I feel great sadness at his loss at that young an age, I can’t help but hear his lazy drawl hear without thinking “damn, he was on a lot of drugs during this.”

Dan Stevens has been lurking on the periphery of stardom for a long while since he left Downton Abbey all those years ago, but, for a paycheck, he’s happy to play absolute dirtbags. And he’s so good at it. Before a certain change of pace, his Frank character is abrasive, but professional and intelligent enough. Once he undergoes some kind of change of conscience, let’s say, he turns into an absolute screaming banshee of a piece of shit, and, despite the fact that the wheels have fallen off of the production by then, he’s kind of a joy to behold. He’s unhinged, and that’s what we paid for.

The funny thing is how many genres this flick goes through, travels through on its way to its ending. I won’t say it’s all seamless, but it does it with enough good humour that you feel less than aggrieved when it’s happening, and more like you’re in on the joke. I mean, there has to be a place for silliness in films, otherwise we’ll all turn into serious fat middle aged jerks stroking our beards and clucking over the minutiae of Oppenheimer until the end of time, and I’d rather he’d destroyed the world than that happen.

The way they give enough backstory to Joey’s character in order to give her bond with Abigail some meaning is, well, it’s hokey, cheesy and trite. But it works. It’s effective. Melissa Barrera sells it, and Alisha Weir, a wonderful young actor who previously played Matilda in the remake of, um, what was it called, oh yeah Matilda the Musical based on whatever devilry Nick Minchin did with Roald Dahl’s corpse, also sells it really well.

At first I didn’t see the shades to the character, because she starts off pretending to be a frightened girl, then she’s a feral vicious lunatic, but then the character is pulled back from the abyss by having a motivation to her murderousness, which, as always, we know is because her father doesn’t love her enough.

And Joey, a recovering addict, has a son she loves but can’t bring herself to visit until she achieves some kind of milestone, some bounty, whereby she will then be able to face him without withering from shame. Frank, clearly Father of the Year material, calls her out on her bullshit, with the only honest line of dialogue he delivers for the whole film.

The others maybe have qualities and shadings and such but let’s not fall all over ourselves overselling things. This isn’t a quality drama, with doilies and coasters everywhere, and people minding their Ps and Qs while extolling in thees and thous: This is a flick where a creature kills a bunch of people, then some other arsehole starts trying to kill them, then people become puppets and or explode in fountains of blood and gore.

That’s the last, unhinged part of the flick. Oh it gets nuts towards the end, possibly in a way that makes you think this was all a joke with a wicked Shyamalan-esque twist in the end. It isn’t, the appearance of a certain character at the end is probably a joke, and probably an opportunity to turn this into a franchise (please don’t).

The funniest element for me is not only the presence of Giancarlo Esposito, but the fact that he was in a film way back in the 1990s that some folks might have heard of, being The Usual Suspects. I mention it because I think it’s a bit of a genius move, meaning that another set of flicks that this lifts from is the “who is Keyser Soze?” genre that that film invented, and which is comically referenced here, in that obviously Abigail isn’t just a girl who likes ballet.

She is, in fact, Keyser Soze, well, maybe not, but she can rip a man’s head off with her bare hands, so that has to count for something.

I really enjoyed it. It did enough to engage me before things turned silly, but by that stage I didn’t mind, and thought that however convoluted the journey there, it was a solid ending for such a smorgasbord of genre nonsense.

Abigail. She’ll dance her way into your heart, and then through your back.

7 times still not enough to make me a fan of ballet out of 10

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“What can I say? I like playing with my food.” – awful habit - Abigail