Abigail (2024)

Official trailer

Abigail deserves its 7 as a gleefully gory, fun vampire film built on a premise that’s a horror version of a heist gone wrong. A crew of criminals kidnaps a twelve-year-old ballerina to ransom her to her wealthy father, holes up in a remote mansion, and slowly discovers that their tiny captive is a centuries-old vampire who has been toying with them the whole time and now intends to eat them one by one.

Abigail is my kind of nasty fun. A crew of criminals figuring out, far too late, that the ballerina they grabbed is the most dangerous thing in the house gives me exactly the cheap thrill I want from a horror movie. I laughed, I winced at the splatter, and I’d forgotten most of the crew’s names by the end, and that adds up to a solid 7.

It’s a single great idea executed with energy, humor, and enthusiastic splatter, led by a young actress clearly having the time of her life. The film doesn’t transcend its premise, but it delivers on it completely, and that’s more than many vampire films manage.

This is a crowd-pleaser with no interest in being a think piece, and I appreciate a horror film that knows exactly what it is. The directing team specializes in horror that’s self-aware without turning smug, and Abigail is a confident genre piece that puts fun ahead of depth and earns most of its laughs and its gore.

The Heist-Horror Structure

The film’s clever structure borrows from the heist movie. The first act assembles a crew of specialists who don’t know each other, gives them a job that seems simple, and locks them in a single location. Then it pulls the rug out, revealing that the job is a trap and the captive is the predator. The familiar heist beats, the assembled team, the locked-down location, the gradual realization that the plan has gone catastrophically wrong, all get repurposed for horror, and the genre fusion gives the film a satisfying shape.

This structure lets the film work as survival horror and as a darkly comic ensemble piece, with the criminals turning on each other, panicking and dying in inventive ways. The mansion becomes a closed hunting ground. A heist crew comes with friction built in, so even thin characters have something to fight about, and fusing the caper with the creature feature is the smartest move the film makes.

Alisha Weir’s Abigail

The film rests on its title character, and young Alisha Weir is a delight. She plays Abigail as a creature who weaponizes the appearance of an innocent little girl, shifting between terrified child and gleeful ancient predator with obvious relish. The horror and the comedy both come from the gap between her small ballerina’s body and the centuries-old monster inside it, and Weir plays both tones with total commitment, menacing one moment and wickedly funny the next.

The conceit of a vampire who looks like a child and uses that look to manipulate and terrify is the film’s best joke and its best source of dread.

Abigail performs helplessness before showing what she is, and Weir works ballet into the kills, dancing between them. Those dance kills are the reason I’d rate it as high as a 7. It’s a star-making turn, and she makes Abigail the scariest and funniest thing on screen.

Fun Over Depth

Abigail loses me a little because it’s all surface and it knows it. There’s no theme and no deeper meaning to the vampire, and the film has no ambition past a good time. The criminals are entertaining types more than developed people, and the plot has holes, with twists that fall apart if you look at them twice. I wish somebody had given the crew one real inner life to lose.

The gore is the other main attraction, and the film delivers it with gleeful excess.

The vampire kills are spectacularly bloody, with exploding bodies and inventive carnage played as much for laughs as for shock, and the practical-effects splatter is enthusiastic and well-executed. Fans of fun, gory horror will be satisfied. Anyone looking for the thematic weight that the best vampire films offer will find Abigail pleasant but slight, a well-made entertainment with nothing underneath. That’s a fair trade for the fun it provides, but it’s the ceiling on the film.

Is Abigail worth watching?

Abigail gets its 7 as a gleefully gory, entertaining vampire film that fuses heist-movie structure with creature-feature horror and delivers completely on its premise. The clever caper architecture, the enthusiastic splatter, and a star-making turn from young Alisha Weir as the child-bodied ancient predator make it a confident, fun crowd-pleaser. It loses points for being all surface, with thin characters, a plot that doesn’t bear scrutiny, and no ambition beyond a good time.

A 7 feels exactly right. I had a lot of fun with Abigail and I’ll remember Alisha Weir’s dancing vampire, but there’s nothing underneath the blood, and the characters around her are too thin for me to care who survives. It’s a well-made popcorn horror film that nails its premise and stops right there.

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