A pack of hired goons get more than they bargained for in this inventive and nasty evil kid romp.
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.
Published 18 Apr 2024
Love radio silence when it comes to twists and spoilers.
Alas, no radio silence when it comes to the twist on this one.
Smart bloody fun, defanged by its own publicity.
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