“Abigail” Tears Genre Apart

Within limits

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Abigail is a heist-gone-wrong film spiced with a slasher—plus vampires, of course. The resulting mixture of thrills, chills, fangs and blood is fun in part because you get to watch the disparate tropes dance around and bite big chunks out of each other. And if the resulting demon/genre spawn ends up being fairly conventional after all—well, you didn’t really expect the cute little girl to go for the jugular, did you?

The heist plot is a kidnapping. A group of specialists are hired to nab 12-year-old Abigail (Alisha Weir) and hold her for $50 million ransom. All goes well initially, and all the team has to do is babysit the kid for 24 hours in a big mansion while they wait for the money.

Things, however, start to go badly. (Spoilers I guess if you somehow haven’t seen any trailers or marketing.) First our (anti)heroes discover that Abigail is the daughter of evil gangland supervillain and Keyser Söze knock-off Kristof Lazaar (Matthew Goode). And then it turns out Abigail isn’t a cute little girl, but is instead (shades of Anne Rice) an ancient vampire and Lazaar’s chief assassin. Abigail’s organized the kidnapping herself because they’ve all pissed off her father in one way or the other, and because, as she says, she likes to play with her food.

The slasher dynamics are probably obvious enough at this point. You start out with six heist bad guys, and then watch them get picked off one by one as you dwindle down to that final girl—in this case, Joey (Melissa Barrera), military medic, addict, and bad-ass with a a heart of gold.

The murders are inventive enough as these things go, and there’s some enjoyably grotesque imagery involving a swimming pool. The real genius, though, is the way that the mash-up makes the typical power and empowerment dynamics of the different genres stagger and spurt in amusing ways.

Slashers are usually built on a single reversal; the remorseless Jason/Freddy/whoever murders their way through an hour and a half or so, and then in the last 15 minutes the supposedly defenseless surviving feminized victim seizes the stake/phallus/chainsaw and does unto others. Heist films, in contrast, are usually designed around multiple plot twists and betrayals.

The movie cleverly sinks its teeth into these tropes alternately. Abigail is first the weak captive, then the nightmarish antagonist—and then switches back and forth a couple times in counterpoint, or unison with, heist-team hacker Sammy (Kathryn Newton), corrupt cop Frank (Dan Stevens), and of course Joey. Rather than an empowerment fantasy (which is what most slashers are) or a twisty exercise in narrative cynicism, Abigail becomes a kind of cynical empowerment tease, where the evil antagonist keeps being someone else, possessing (sometimes literally) various characters in turn.

There are moments in this spinning ballet of pulpy fun where you really aren’t entirely sure which familiar tropes are going to be deployed how, which means it’s not clear who’s going to be left standing at the end. I enjoyed the uncertainty, but apparently Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett didn’t trust their audience to follow them anywhere too weird, and the narrative ends by carefully pirouetting its way into a position where the least sympathetic bleed out while those touched in any way by narrative primacy bury their various weapons together in the designated climactic beats.

I’m not saying Abigail is bad. On the contrary, it’s a worthwhile 100 minutes if you like smart, empty-headed pulp. It does bring home, though, the difference between Tarantino and the Coen Brothers and many of their imitators. Slicing and dicing genre is entertaining in its own right. But if your sole goal is the slicing and the dicing, you tend to end up with a gory Frankenstein monster that’s contradictorily less oddly shaped than if you actually have a vision.