Hold Me Closer, Tiny Dancer … You Had a Busy Day Today: Abigail (2024)

A team of six professionals undertake a mission to kidnap a young girl (codenamed Tiny Dancer) from her fancy house and then babysit her for 24 hours. By then, her rich daddy should have coughed up $50 million for her safe return. None of the crooks knows one another, each has a given name taken from the Rat Pack. The job seems simple enough until Joey (Melissa Barrera), the team member tasked with keeping Abigail (Alisha Weir) safe and comfortable gets a cryptic message from the child, “I’m sorry for what’s going to happen to you.”

That leads to big questions about who her father is, what resources he might employ for vengeance’s sake, and whether or not the group wants to stay mixed up with this whole scenario. When the father in question turns out to be the Keyser Söze of this particular world and that his chief instrument of retaliation may well have found this safe house tucked away far from the hustle and bustle of the city, the crooks decide to forgo the money and skip out. However, that decision comes too late. The safehouse locks down, trapping them inside with a killer.

Paranoia sets in. Might the killer actually be one of them? Medic turned heister Joey, former police detective turned dirty Frank (Dan Stevens), former marine sniper Rickles (William Catlett), privileged girl turned for-the-lulz hacker Sammy (Kathryn Newton), Quebecois muscle Peter (Kevin Durand), or mumblecore wheelman Dean (Angus Cloud)? Could Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito) the man who assembled their team be involved? Or is something altogether different going on here? Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (aka Radio Silence) helm a weird crime picture that pits crooks against their own paranoia as well as a supernatural threat in Abigail (2024).

The unfortunate thing about Abigail is how the major surprises and twists are completely given away in the advertising materials. It’s pretty much the same story as with Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), which features a trailer that lets audiences know who the good time traveler and who is the bad one even before anyone steps foot into the theater. Both Abigail and Terminator 2 employ some elaborate tricks in the pacing and plotting of their first Acts to keep us wondering who can be trusted and what’s going on until the reveal. So, thanks advertising people for spoiling some of the fun.

I can understand the impetus for marketing to cut the trailer the way they did. The threat itself is pretty much one of the nifty draws for the picture. Bloodthirsty monsters masquerading as a ballet dancer? It is a visual that works. It certainly made quite an impact in a flick like Livid (2011). However, showing as much as the trailer does is a rotten trick because it is not content to give away things from the first half of the movie, it cherry picks coolness from the complete run time, and leaves few real surprises to be had from watching the thing.

Make no mistake. There is a meticulous attention to meting out information in the screenplay from Stephen Shields and Guy Busick’s that is enviable. The movie opens with the hoods in place for their snatch, gets right into the scenario, offers up some enjoyable visuals and tension, lets things simmer a bit as the team starts to relax and push the boundaries of the rules they’ve been given stressing anonymity, and then adds in new stakes, complications, mysteries, suspense, and a bucket or two of blood. It tracks nicely, throwing in a few reasonable red herrings along the way to keep the characters guessing. The audience would likely be guessing, as well, if the trailer hadn’t already told us pretty much all the punchlines and payoffs instead of focusing on the setups.

Melissa Barrera has a character with more range than the others. She gets to be haughty, professional, have a backstory involving a weakness that drove a wedge in her family, which she longs to overcome. The mix of strength and vulnerability is played quite well.

The other actors have less developed archetypes to play, but they do so quite well.

Kevin Durand is terrific as the big, French-accented dude with all the muscles. He steals scenes with his questions and revelations. And he has the believable physicality to pull off the action as well. Loved him.

Kathryn Newton gets to meld the sexy schoolgirl wardrobe with a talent for technology, offering a sunshiney flipside to Pauley Perrette’s goth Abby Sciuto character from NCIS. A lot of fun.

Dan Stevens can’t seem to settle on an accent. Perhaps it’s only supposed to come out in times of stress, but it wobbles between Brooklyn, Boston, and Midwest bland. I didn’t care about that much because the character is so delightfully sleazy and awful that he’s fun to watch.

William Catlett plays the brooding and mysterious man well. Alas, the script doesn’t have a ton for him to do, but I was pleased by the longing sighs from the row behind ours whenever he was on screen. There were some fans back there, all right.

Alisha Weir gets to have a merry old time as the frightened kid with a secret, the mind games player, and ultimately the threat. The character winds up going through quite a few dramatic changes over time (both behavioral and visual), and she has fun with them all.

And Giancarlo Esposito is a treat. Always a treat. One of the finer actors working these days. He knows how to get into the skin of the character, and this time he gets to play through some FX makeup, as well.

The score from Brian Tyler puts the suspense and mystery themes at the fore, but there is also a sense of longing and pathos in several of the tracks that calls back to some of the classic monster movies of yesteryear. Supposedly, this picture draws some inspiration from the classic Universal flick, Dracula’s Daughter (1936), and though the plot doesn’t quite play that way, the score offers some nods in that direction with its blend of gloom and gothic thrills.

The lighting and cinematography from Aaron Morton takes good advantage of the mansion turned deathtrap environment for the picture. The setting has some lovely texture for the action to play against, and individual rooms have a good sense for character.

The special effects and makeup are one of the major treats here. The supernatural elements look impressively nasty, the gory wounds looks believably painful, and the blood dries to darker hues over time instead of looking bright and arterial from start to finish. Some of the more explosive material is undoubtedly designed in a computer instead of in the practical side of things, but it doesn’t call undue attention to itself and manages to add coolness factor to the scenes instead of popping us out of the moment.

Audience members who share by affection for Radio Silence’s earlier film Ready or Not (2019) will find some intriguing parallels between the two pictures. Some of the images overlap (including a finale involving a shellshocked survivor sucking on a stick—there it was a cigarette, here it is something altogether different), an enjoyment for exploding body parts that shower an area with gore, a fascination with violent action that focuses on mortification of the flesh, as well as a character falling into a body pit that is truly disgusting. This picture’s beats follow a similar progression to Ready or Not (it was also co-scripted by Guy Busick), as well. I look forward to watching them back to back once Abigail hits a home media option to see how the movies echo one another.

Although the trailer killed some of the surprises for me, Abigail remains an enjoyable and gory fright flick of the weird crime variety. It’s a group of characters who think they have the upper hand realizing they don’t and are, in fact, prey for a monster many of them don’t even want to believe exists. Splattery, a bit silly, looking good, and acted well, it’s enjoyable as hell.

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Abigail is currently showing only in theaters. In time, I’m sure it will make an appearance in DVD, Blu-ray, and/or VOD editions.

On Wednesday, we will take a look at a monster movie of a very different sort. When a couple of craft brewers tick off a coven of witches who curse their latest batch of brew, they must find a way to appease the witches’ wrath before all hell breaks loose in their town. The horror comedy Witch’s Brew is available in DVD, Blu-ray, and VOD editions.

Writing for “Hold Me Closer, Tiny Dancer … You Had a Busy Day Today: Abigail (2024)” is copyright © 2024 by Daniel R. Robichaud.

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