Abigail (M18)
109 minutes, opens on April 18
3 stars
The story: Children can be such monsters. A criminal gang abducts the 12-year-old ballerina daughter of an underworld kingpin for ransom, only to discover the girl is not human as she begins biting their heads off one by one.
The theme music is a reprisal of the ballet Swan Lake (1877) from Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula, and it is no spoiler to introduce Abigail as a contemporary reimagining of Dracula’s Daughter (1936) since this Universal Classic Monsters update has many more surprises: Foremost, who, if any, among the amusing ensemble of bickering, paranoid kidnappers will survive?
The kind medic (Melissa Barrera)? The slimy ex-cop (Dan Stevens)? The bratty hacker (Kathryn Newton), the stoic sniper (Will Catlett), the dimwitted muscle (Kevin Durand) or the junkie wheelman (the late Angus Cloud in his final screen role)?
The six strangers recruited by a mysterious fixer (Giancarlo Esposito) have retreated to an isolated mansion to wait for the overnight ransom drop when their sweet little hostage Abigail (Alisha Weir) unleashes her feral self. The captors become captives, trapped inside the corridors and chambers with a ravenous throat-ripping bloodsucker.
Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett of film-making collective Radio Silence have built a successful modern horror brand from Ready Or Not (2019) and the Scream franchise revivals (2022 and 2023), and this here is an audaciously batty vampire-cum-heist thriller.
The raucous cross-genre romp with its graphic splattergore, imploding bodies and exuberant black humour is also part Agatha Christie mystery, part The Exorcist (1973). But Abigail herself is an unhinged novel act who dances to her own tune, jete-ing onto the jugulars of her victims: Fourteen-year-old Irish actress Weir (Matilda The Musical, 2023) fully earns her star billing.
Hot take: Bloody fun, no holds barre.
La Chimera (PG13)
130 minutes, opens on April 18 exclusively at The Projector
4 stars
The story: An English archaeologist (Josh O’Connor) after a prison stint in Italy returns to the countryside and falls back in with his merry band of tomb raiders, Lara Croft decidedly not among them.
La Chimera is set around 1980 Tuscany, although place and time are a liminal space in the pastoral magic-realist fables of Italian auteur Alice Rohrwacher.
The Tuscan native is revered in the cinephile circle for her autobiographical storytelling and unique cinematic language. All four of the writer-director’s narrative features were selected for competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
Her latest closes a loose trilogy following The Wonders (2014) and 2018 Cannes’ Best Screenplay winner Happy As Lazzaro.
It is like a folk ballad at once playful and soulful. There are troubadours, and the singing, dancing gang of vagabond grave-robbers are carnivalesque carousers straight out of a movie by the director’s 1950s cinema forebear Federico Fellini.
Arthur, played by O’Connor from the Netflix series The Crown (2019 to 2020), is their reluctant leader because of his preternatural instinct for dowsing Etruscan burial sites. They dig up antiquities from the crypts, and then fence the loot to a shady dealer (the film-maker’s sister, Alba Rohrwacher).
The rumpled expatriate is, however, seeking not riches underground but a legendary gate to the spirit world – to his lost love, Beniamina (Yile Yara Vianello).
The desultory quest traverses the past and a spectral present, the living and the dead, history and myth, decaying villas and parched lands.
Alice Rohrwacher does not explain, not even where Beniamina might have gone (Isabella Rossellini, by the way, is simply grand as Beniamina’s mother).
She trusts the audience to catch on and succumb to the spell of enchantment.
Hot take: This treasure hunt to recover buried memories, relics and a vanished love is wondrous.
