Abigail

A group of criminals kidnap the 12-year-old daughter of a powerful underworld figure. Holding her for ransom in an isolated mansion, their plan begins to unravel when they discover that their young captive has a deadly secret.

If you’ve watched the trailer for this film, then you already know what’s going on. If you haven’t watched the trailer, then I would suggest that you don’t watch it at all, because it pretty much reveals the movie’s entire trick right away. It's not like the film has much else going on to talk about, but still, it's crazy how they just give it all away in 2 minutes. But also... it's totally obvious what's going to happen here, almost from the very first moment, so I’ll try not to spoil it here myself, but… shit happens, my friends, especially when it comes to a pretty basic straightforward film like this one.

So...

Abigail is your basic “strangers locked in a room together and need to get out” story, with a plot rooted in the Jeff Goldblum quote from Lost World: “Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming.”

The film opens with a gang of disparate criminals stalking a young and very obviously rich ballerina girl. They trail her home using a tracker stuck under her car that is so ridiculously big, that I was almost going to call Shenanigans, but the end of the film pretty much fixes the issue. So, the gang raids her house, drugs the girl, and takes her to their safe house to hold her while the ransom is arranged, and let me tell you... the safe house is the most ridiculously creepy old gothic mansion you can imagine. It’s the kind of a place where everything looks to be a hundred years old, and is draped in cobwebs, with dozens of rooms, and creaking stairs, and you can probably assume that there are a bunch of secret passageways. It is 100% not the place you want to hang out in if you have a dust allergy. It also has lots of creepy statues and murals all over the place, all of them featuring a creepy-looking tall man in a hat and his... wait for it... creepy little daughter! Do you think maybe that's indicative of some upcoming secret reveal? No? Me neither. So, like I was saying, this is basically the kind of place that has a curb appeal that says: ”Hey, guess what? A really old vampire lives here.”

Allegedly… because vampires don't exist.

The gang is your pretty standard mix of ne’re-do-wells for hire, all of them put together by a man named Lambert. He’s the one who will be arranging the ransom. Before he leaves the safe house, he cautions them to be careful not share their real names, or any details from their lives, so he assigns them all fake names, using the Rat Pack as his guide. There’s our hero… Joey, who's an ex-junkie, former Army medic with a heart of gold and a kid at home, who's doing bad things for a good reason. Then there's Frank, a former dirty cop. Peter, the big doofus muscle. Dean, a dumb white kid wheelman. Sammy, a Hot Topic-edgy rich girl hacker. And Don Rickles, a black man and a former marine with a code of honor. Lambert refers to them all as “my lovely little pack of rats” with a smirk, and then he leaves, locking them all inside the big creepy gothic mansion until the morning.

The whole "rats" thing, and the Rat Pack names? That was a deliberate choice, y'see, because it has an extra meaning. Now, I'm not going tell you what that extra meaning is exactly... you'll have to watch and find out yourself...

So anyway, they're all inside the big mansion until morning, trapped like... I don't know, some kind of animal, maybe.

Anyway...

Soon enough, the little girl in question starts being… creepy. Sammy knows something is up, but the others are all a bunch fuckups too desperate for a pay day to give a shit. Of course, that all changes when they find out that they’ve kidnapped the daughter of a legendary gangster known only as Lazaar, a man who is a kind of gangland urban legend bogeyman, a man who supposedly employs an even worse boogeyman, a hitman by the name of Valdez. 

That’s when they start to get a little worried, but since the creepy mansion is locked down weirdly tight, with steel shutters and doors, they have no other choice than to settle in for the night, collect their pay in the morning, and try to disappear before the girl’s father can catch up to them.

But y’know… the best laid plans of rats and men…

This film is pretty paint by numbers, so the biggest surprise here is the black guy isn’t the first one to die, so that’s cool. He doesn’t last much longer, but hey, small victories, I guess. But still, once they all realize they’re locked inside the big creepy mansion, and something terrible is happening, one by one, as none of them are the sharpest knives in the drawer, they start making the classic mistakes. Like when all of the characters who are still alive decide to split up and search the house because of a variety of terrible reasons that do not hold up to scrutiny at all. This film is not like the movie Barbarian at all, where the myriad of bad decisions could be said to make at least some sense at the time. In Abigail, it's just bad decision after bad decision. So yeah, spoiler... splitting up doesn’t end well for them.

After that it’s just a bunch of blood, and some running and screaming…

My wife normally doesn’t like horror films, but for some reason, Kathryn Newton really annoys her, so she was excited to watch her get hers. Meanwhile, as a huge fan of the film The Guest, as well as the tv show Legion, I’m all in for any movie with Dan Stevens. So a fun night was had all around.

In a nutshell, Abigail is The Usual Suspects meets a Twilight Zone episode, with a little bit of Interview with the Vampire thrown in, and all splattered liberally with True Blood. It’s a film that is short and sweet, and straight to the point, something I can really appreciate. Also, it doesn’t pretend like it’s anything more than what it is… which is a pretty basic cinematic version of a roller coaster. This is something that is both in the film's favor, but it also means that it's a bit humdrum too, as their are no real surprises here.

That said, I did like the brief glimpse into the secret world of this film's world, but I'll admit that this is mostly just a niche me thing, and other than a brief glimpse, there’s mostly nothing really there to write home about either.

Abigail is fine. That’s it.