Abi­gail – avoid the trail­er for max­i­mum, bloody pleasure

Any­one in the crit­i­cal game knows that spoil­ers — at least for reviews timed to be pub­lished with a film’s gen­er­al release and espe­cial­ly when that film piv­ots around a killer twist — are to be avoid­ed. Yet in the eter­nal dance between art and com­merce, what might be called the From Dusk Till Dawn effect, can some­times come into play: a film painstak­ing­ly con­struct­ed so that it appears to belong to one genre, before it sud­den­ly, vio­lent­ly shifts into anoth­er, has its reel­ing, dis­ori­ent­ing plea­sures ruined by the film’s mar­ket­ing cam­paign long before any crit­ic can spoil the viewer’s fun. Abi­gail is such a film.

It begins with six strangers com­ing togeth­er for a crim­i­nal enter­prise: Joey (Melis­sa Bar­rera); Frank (Dan Stevens); Sam­my (Kathryn New­ton); Rick­les (William Catlett); Peter (Kevin Durand); and Dean (Angus Cloud) — not their real names, but pseu­do­nyms assigned, Reser­voir Dogs-style, by their han­dler Lam­bert (Gian­car­lo Espos­i­to). The mis­sion: drug and abduct ​‘tiny dancer’ Abi­gail (Alisha Weir) for a ran­som large enough to alter their lives radically. 

When they arrive at the weird old man­sion that is to serve as their hide­out until the mon­ey is hand­ed over, their para­noia about who Abigail’s father might real­ly be, and what exact­ly each one of them is doing there, is ampli­fied by the gris­ly death of one of their num­ber, as they realise that they have been lured into an Agatha Christie-like trap. 

For some­one lurk­ing in the shad­ows is toy­ing with them, and it seems that where they start as six, then there were none. Yet the can­dy-addict­ed Joey, who has promised the young bal­le­ri­na that no harm will come to her, and who is des­per­ate to get back to her own young son, is smarter than the oth­ers and will not give up with­out a fight. 

Direc­tors Matt Bet­tinel­li-Olpin and Tyler Gillett bring the star of their slash­er ​‘requels’ Scream (2022) and Scream VI (2023) into a play­ful dynas­tic sce­nario more akin to their ear­li­er Ready or Not (2019), while lay­er­ing in shades of Julien Mau­ry and Alexan­dre Bustillo’s Livid (2011) and even Dario Argento’s Phe­nom­e­na (1985). It is fun­ny, grotesque, assured­ly savvy and very bloody — and one might dis­cern, in its pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with errant par­ents strug­gling to get clos­er to their estranged chil­dren, a Mes­sage that could be called universal. 

To sug­gest any­thing more would be to give the whole game away — not that any such con­sid­er­a­tion stopped the trail­er from doing so. It is, of course, no fault of the film itself that much of its good work has been defanged from the out­set by its own spoil­er campaign. 

Yet we are now con­demned to be sec­ond-time view­ers, already know­ing the sur­prise to come and left mere­ly to admire the craft of the (now point­less­ly) hid­den tells. While you watch it, try to imag­ine an alter­na­tive world in which the film exists free of its own pub­lic­i­ty, and so still has the capac­i­ty to catch view­ers off guard and to throw them for a six. Blame our con­sumerist culture.