Abigail (2024)

Abigail arrives with a premise any honest ledger would call efficient: six criminals, one secluded manor, a twelve-year-old ballerina who turns out to be several centuries old and extremely hungry. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett direct with the slick, splattery confidence they brought to their earlier work, and the result is a vampire picture that knows exactly what it is and declines to apologize for the blood budget. Alisha Weir performs her own stunts and a great deal of ballet, lending the carnage an unexpected elegance. The cast is large, diverse, and uniformly game, though the film never pauses to congratulate itself for that fact.

On the matter of representation, the ensemble includes Melissa Barrera, William Catlett, Giancarlo Esposito, and Angus Cloud in substantial roles, and the film treats their presence as unremarkable, which is the correct approach and the reason the score here stays modest. Joey, played by Barrera, is a capable lead with a military past and an estranged son, and the climax turns on her willingness to mother a monster who has never been mothered properly. Abigail herself is a formidable female antagonist. None of this amounts to an argument. The film stages a bond between two women and lets the audience feel it without announcing a thesis, which is more than many of its contemporaries manage.

The remaining categories sit at zero, and not for lack of effort on my part in searching. Race is never mentioned. Class resentment never surfaces, despite a fifty-million-dollar ransom sitting at the center of the plot. The climate is not a concern. Nobody is neurodivergent, nobody is on a journey of body acceptance, and history is not revised so much as raided for vampire folklore. What we have is a gleeful, bloody crowd-pleaser with no sermon to deliver and no interest in delivering one. Recommended for those who prefer their horror unburdened.