The film centres around a bunch of kidnappers who snatch a little girl after she has come home from dance class. The kidnappers are led by Lambert (played by Giancarlo Esposito) and also include Kathryn Newton as Sammy and Dan Stevens as Frank so it has a pretty good cast. All the gang seem to have enough to make their characters seem different and less generic. Joey (played by Melissa Barrera) is the one that seems to have something approaching compassion as she forms a motherly connection with Abigail.
After the kidnapping, they are left with Abigail in a massive country mansion with a fully stocked bar and time to kill. It’s at this stage things seems to just going through the motions until the inevitable happens and it comes when Joey and Abigail are bonding and Abigail apologies for what is going to happen. This is when the jump scares start and we are primed to start expecting things to go BANG quite loud. We start seeing camera angles which are supposed to draw our attention and sometimes it leads to something and sometimes it doesn’t.
I do like the house setting. It worked well in ‘Ready or Not’ because it means you have just the one location but many rooms to do scenes in so you don’t feel like you’re stuck in a restricted setting. It is quite sometime before one of them tries to think to leave but realise that they have been locked in. It seems a little odd that with so many in the group that not one of them thought to try the door sooner or question why so many need to stay at the house. From a plot point of view it makes sense because it keeps the characters in the house so they can be picked off later on. When things do start going crazy then that is when the fun starts.
Sadly the twist was spoilt for me because I saw a picture somewhere which showed that she was indeed a vampire. I think that this film would have worked a lot better had I not known the twist although there is a chance that I may have figured it out relatively quickly. What I didn’t or couldn’t have guessed is that Abigail came up with the plan to get them all together because they have all got a connection to Abigail’s family. At first I thought it was a bit of a lame twist but as the scene unfolded I found myself enjoying it and thinking it worked quite well.
The cast is a bit hit and miss. Dan Stevens is always dependable and the last time I saw him was in ‘Godzilla x Kong’ but despite this being a very different role from that film. There is still something likeable about him and that might be because of Stevens’ personality. There is something about Kathryn Newton that means her performances are wildly inconsistent. One minute she is really good in ‘Freaky’ and then she is just bland in ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantamania’. Here she is suppose to be a tattooed covered rebellious tech obsesses woman and I just didn’t buy it. I did think that Alisha Weir was very good as Abigail. The last thing I saw her in was ‘Wicked Little Letters’ earlier in the year and this is a very different performance and she is as impressive in this as she was that film. It can be hit and miss with child actors but Weir is in the good category.
It is hard to not keep referencing ‘Ready or Not’ with this film. Not just cause of the house but also because the gore is the same and there is another scene where a blonde finds herself in a gross pit. This one is arguably more grosser than in ‘Ready or Not’ but it’s still pretty bad and the humour is about the same. There is also the idea of what is happening involving a game. In ‘Ready or Not’ it’s the obvious game and in this it’s all just a game to amuse Abigail. There is also the extreme body explosions which were excellent in both films. They did seem a little cheap in ‘Ready or Not’ but that isn’t something that could be said here. It was gruesome but also seemed like it was done in camera. As the film progressed it did start resembling ‘Ready or Not’ more than it probably should have done.
It’s been a pretty weak year so far for horror with ‘Late Night with the Devil’ being the best so far but I have to admit that this film is much better. Whilst it might have a more straight forward narrative, the gore is pretty good. Not excessive but still nasty and it know what it is and does it well. I am always a fan of isolated settings and apart from the beginning, the house is a character on its own and they make good use of it. Abigail is a very good film and it would have been nice for this film to be released closer to Halloween.
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