Radio Silence turn a kidnap film into a vampire film, with a superb small monster in Alisha Weir and bodies that burst rather than bleed. It is also twenty minutes too long and cannot stop explaining its own rules.
Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, who work together as Radio Silence, made Ready or Not (2019), in which a bride spent her wedding night being hunted through her in-laws’ house. Abigail is the same trick with the furniture rearranged. Six criminals kidnap a twelve-year-old ballerina, take her to a mansion in the country and settle in to wait for a ransom. The trailers have told everybody what happens next, so we will say it too: the child is a vampire, and the doors are locked. It is a rowdy, bloody, likeable film that would be better at ninety minutes, and it cannot stop telling us its rules.
The first stretch plays as a straight heist. Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito) hands the crew Rat Pack names, Joey, Frank, Sammy, Rickles, Peter, Dean, and tells them not to swap anything true. Susie Cullen’s mansion is the film’s best idea after the girl: panelled halls, a spiral stair, a kitchen with a dumbwaiter, a library, a swimming pool in the basement, all of it lit by Aaron Morton in lamplight and brown shadow so that the corners are never quite empty. The crew bicker and drink and wander off alone. If you have somehow avoided the marketing, this half hour is tense. If you have not, it is a long wait for something you already know.
Then Alisha Weir gets to work, and the film finds its feet. Weir plays Abigail first as a frightened child who asks politely to go home, then as something that has been alive far longer than the men guarding her and is bored by them. She dances when she kills. The moment that got us was a sound: a girl’s feet in pointe shoes coming down a dark corridor towards a man who has just realised what she is, and our skin went cold. Gwen Jeffares Hourie keeps her in a pale pink leotard and tutu, and the pink lasts about forty minutes before it starts going dark from the hem up.
Dan Stevens, as Frank, the former policeman who appoints himself leader, plays it with an American snarl and a grin that says he has read the script and knows how much fun he is having. He and Weir have the film between them. Kevin Durand’s Peter, the muscle, is sweet and slow and gets the best lines about what vampires can and cannot do. Kathryn Newton and William Catlett are fine and underused. Angus Cloud’s Dean is a getaway driver who is never quite awake, and the film knows how to use him.
The gore is the point and it is done well. Bodies do not bleed here; they go off, and the first time one did we laughed out loud and then felt a bit ashamed of ourselves. Michael P. Shawver cuts the early kills fast and clean, so that the joke and the shock arrive together. Brian Tyler’s score keeps returning to Swan Lake, which is the joke told again in music, and it works every time. By the fourth explosion, though, we had noticed that each one was the same as the last, and we started to check the time.
The trouble is Stephen Shields and Guy Busick’s script, which does not trust the premise to carry itself. Every twenty minutes somebody stops to list what kills a vampire, then the film tests the list, then someone amends it. Melissa Barrera’s Joey is given a child of her own and a drug habit she has beaten, and Barrera plays it with a steadiness that turns into flatness as the film asks her to carry more and more of the feeling. The last half hour reverses itself three or four times, adds a character it did not need, and ends on a fight in which we lost track of who was where.
Ready or Not had one house, one night and one rule, and it was out of the door in under a hundred minutes. Abigail has the same house and about the same night, and runs 109, and nearly all of the extra is talk. It carries an 18 certificate and earns it in the first hour. Go with people who laugh at blood, and do not ask what happened to the plot in the last twenty minutes, because the film is not sure either.
