At the crossroads of horror and gangster, Abigail, the new film from Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, opens in cinemas on May 29, 2024. A (very) modern retelling of the myth of Dracula's daughter, already brought to the screen by Lambert Hillyer in 1936 and Jesús Franco in 1972, the film takes place over the course of a single night, during which a group of criminals - in reality, real Pieds Nickelés - unknowingly kidnap the daughter of an underworld tycoon.
The young ballerina played by Alisha Weir (discovered in the musical Matilda) turns out to be far less puny than she appears. As the night progresses in this vast, gothic mansion, the apprentice kidnappers disappear one after the other - for if it weren't enough for her to be a vampire (and an insufferable brat, by the way), Abigail also has superhuman strength.
Universal Monsters, those cult monsters of classic horror films, attempted a Hollywood comeback with the Dark Universe, but the consecutive failures of Dracula Untold and The Mummy put the brakes on the project. And the return of Dracula's daughter is no exception.
Although we could have hoped for better from the two directors (they worked together on Scream 's 5th and 6th installments, and are currently working on the 7th), Abigail, full of evil-deadly impulses , oscillates painfully between humor and horror, without ever being truly funny or terrifying. Despite its substantial budget, the film is a kind ofheavy-handed embryo that never finds the right tone: the outrageously trashy deaths don't provoke a shudder, and the slightest joke, delivered like a punchline, doesn't provoke a smile.
Likewise, it's hard to fear for the survival of this band of broken arms - Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, William Catlett, Kathryn Newton, Kevin Durand (a sort of Elon Musk on steroids) and Angus Cloud (whose last performance this is, theEuphoria actor having passed away last year) - who think they're cool but are each more clueless than the last. Go ahead, Abigail, knock yourself out! As for you, if you consider that the quality of a horror film is summed up by the number of liters of hemoglobin poured onto the screen, you're in for a treat.
