There are times when a viewer has to recognize that there’s going to be some shit in a filmmaker’s filmography that does not click with their specific tastes and, no matter how much good there is that outweighs the bad, the dreadful aspects of it still frustrate them to the point where they walk out of a decent film feeling less-than-satisfied. For me, this is what I go through when watching a non-Scream Radio Silence movie (I think their work in that universe is just dreadful, but people love that shit) — Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who work under that moniker as writer-director-producers, make the kind of high-concept genre movies I should respond to, given that they’re horror filmmakers with the ability to craft absurdly competent and intriguing elevator pitches. If you were a big-shot producer and one of them caught you in line at the DMV to give you the logline for Ready or Not, you’d likely take that screenplay and at least give it a cursory look, and if you were smart enough to know exactly what mainstream horror fans – at least on Twitter – want out of their multiplex experiences, you’d probably call in the calvary to rush this on to screens. They make fresh, original IP without all the alienating aspects of “elevated” horror, perfect for competing with the Blumhouses and Platinum Dunes in the market at the late-spring or late-summer box office. Yet their work lacks a certain je ne sais quoi, and their latest, the Vampire horror-comedy Abigail, demonstrates that, even as they improve many aspects of their work, some missing element keeps them from taking that next step.
As usual with these dudes, Abigail has a killer single-sentence hook: What if a group of kidnappers discovered that the child they’d taken for ransom was a vampire? I’m tempted to just leave the summary at that, but the specifics are decently fun. After a successful snatch-and-grab operation where a gang of professional criminals seize the child of an unknown – yet presumably very powerful – man, they’re tasked by their handler (Giancarlo Esposito) to watch her for a full 24 hours at a derelict mansion. He takes their phones, gives them nicknames from Friends, and vanishes into the night, leaving the six crooks to their business. They’re standard-issue cliches but played by a compelling set of character actors. There’s the ex-cop (Dan Stevens, twirling his mustache with chaotic evil), the Quebecois muscle (Kevin Durand, the stealth MVP), the wheelman (Angus Cloud, RIP), the hacker (Kathryn Newton), the ex-marine sniper (Will Catlett), and Joey (Melissa Barrera), the Mom who is doing bad shit to make sure she gets her kid back.
This relationship with her own kid makes her the perfect point person to deal with their hostage, a young ballerina named Abigail (Alisha Weir), with whom she makes a pretty quick connection, even if it comes accompanied by handguns and cuffs. The problems present themselves pretty quickly: The group is almost opposed to one another in temperament as they get fucked up at the stocked bar before everything goes to hell. The ex-cop fucks up by showing his face to the girl and, in a fit of panic, demands to know who her father is, with the answer he receives shaking him to his core. She’s the daughter of a prominent crime lord, who may be the common element that unites everyone there, and they vow to do everything they can to last the night, using the girl as a bargaining chip. But, of course, she has other plans for them, and when the bodies hit the floor, Joey and company realize they’re dealing with something a little more serious than a tutu-sporting kid would suggest.
Anything involving Abigail herself is stellar (although she is the one who utters the film’s only “fucking fuck,” which is the Pet Sound that Radio Silence loves the most) – Weir manages to strike a solid balance between her character’s menace and her sarcasm, she’s able to hold her own against these established actors in a way that ensures her presence will be more memorable than theirs. The group themselves are decently structured – Cloud’s character is annoying and vaguely creepy, with his childish antics (such as drawing a dick on Durand’s face while the muscle-bound man is taking a bourbon-assisted snooze) underwriting the fact that he’s also probably the most unstable person in the room. You can fill out a D&D alignment chart with the ensemble here, and Abigail takes on the chaotic neutral role. These are not irredeemable people, but it’s hard to say they don’t deserve what’s coming. Likewise, the gore is well-crafted, with there being a solid mixture of practical effects to counteract some of the goofier CG, and the screenplay is oftentimes a witty compliment to the kind of Raimi-style slapstick that informs many of the action sequences. All in all, it’s a pretty decent and entertaining mainstream horror flick that likely will find an audience a bit less jaded than myself regarding what they’re willing to slap the “good movie” label on.
But the issues that I’ve had with the whole of Radio Silence’s work since Ready or Not are still present in Abigail in some way. It feels like they cut Ryan Reynolds a check each time they use a gag at the Deadpool caliber, and they never quite have the right ensemble to pull it off. Out of all the films they’ve made, Stevens and Weir are the performers that come the closest – Stevens, honking a Queens accent for the runtime, is malicious yet annoyingly petty, and Weir, as stated above, is playing by a different set of rules than anyone in their films, hovering above the action as a taunting threat and vague moral arbiter. It’s nice that they took the abstract out – the family’s curse in Ready or Not or the ever-shifting identities behind the Ghostfaces – and dispensed with a lot of the “mystery” inherent in trying to uncover the truth there, but the flippant tenor of the film’s humor is more frustrating than what I, specifically, like to see. That same flippancy informs their films’ metatextual aspects – making a critique of a Star Wars controversy in a Scream film in lieu of examining a solid ten years of horror evolution was short-sighted and dumb – and when Abigail begins to drift into a similar real, it gets grating. Newton, at one point, lists off an entire host of vampire films, and the group tries to solve exactly how one should kill a vampire through all of their knowledge of media, which, at least, leads to a decently funny action sequence.
All of this is to say that I think there’s an inflated self-awareness about Radio Silence’s work, and that may be the aspect of their filmography that keeps me from fully enjoying the delights of a film like Abigail. It’s an impulse I genuinely understand – the entire endeavor is centered around novelty and the clever application and subversion of genre cliché, after all – but when it reaches the audience, I can’t help but feel that it’s a distraction that cracks the suspension of disbelief in an entirely unintended way, drawing the attention of the audience away from full immersion to a sort of half-aware state. This lack of tonal command is what a lot of the meta-genre stuff misses when striving to hit the same territory as Cabin in the Woods, Mandy, or any other modern classic that riffs on and synthesizes elements from disparate sources to alchemize cinematic gold. The audience’s acknowledgment of clever writing or filmmaking comes secondary to the experience- the thrill of seeing something truly stimulating on-screen without the intrusion of analytical thoughts – and as far as Radio Silence has come, they still haven’t made that transcendental leap.