Warning: This article contains spoilers for Abigail (2024).
In Abigail, what starts as the greedy kidnapping of a powerful man’s daughter turns into a desperate, rats-in-a-maze fight for survival. After two of their team members are savagely murdered, Joey (Scream 6‘s Melissa Barrera), Frank (Dan Stevens), Sammy (Kathryn Newton), and Peter (Kevin Durand) realize that Abigail (Alisha Weir), the little girl they were hired to kidnap, isn’t an innocent ballerina but a centuries-old vampire. In case that wasn’t bad enough, Abigail reveals that she specifically chose all of them as her latest targets, hired them under false pretenses, and lured them to an old family estate so that she could kill them for their past crimes against her father’s criminal empire.
All four of Abigail‘s core protagonists do their best to survive their vampire captor’s attacks, but eventually Frank and Joey are the only humans left standing. Just when it looks like Abigail may have them cornered, though, a secret passageway opens and the two characters find Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito), Frank’s once-trusted contact, waiting for them in a hidden security room. With his fangs bared, Lambert explains that Abigail turned him into a vampire two years prior and, by threatening his family, forced him to set up Frank, Joey, and all of the fallen members of their crew.
However, rather than standing by and letting them die, Lambert offers to turn Frank, the most selfish and mean-spirited of the film’s human characters, into a fully autonomous vampire so that they can work together to take Abigail and her father down. Frank accepts the offer — letting Lambert bite him and then willingly drinking his vampiric blood. Once Frank’s transformation is complete, he subsequently kills Lambert, drains Abigail of some of her blood, and begins to stalk Joey.
A bloody fight ensues between Joey and Frank, who wants to turn her into a vampire he can control. A weakened Abigail intervenes and tells Joey she’ll let her live if she helps her destroy Frank. The two team up and, while Frank briefly believes at one point that he has successfully turned Joey into his first vampire servant, she tricks him and pins him to the ground with Abigail. As the two slowly drive a stake into Frank’s heart, Abigail tells Frank that his mistake was thinking he could immediately master techniques that take every vampire years to learn. One well-timed comedic beat later, Frank is impaled and his body literally explodes — covering Abigail and Joey in his blood.
In the moments that follow, Abigail tells Joey to leave and find her son, whose absence has haunted her throughout the film. While Joey wonders whether her son will forgive her for abandoning him, Abigail tells her that sometimes all a child wants is for their parent to show up. Unfortunately, it’s at that very moment that Abigail’s father, Dracula himself (played by Matthew Goode), walks in and almost kills Joey in a fit of parental rage. When Abigail steps between them and tells her father that Joey was there to protect her when he wasn’t, his demeanor softens. He tells Joey to leave, warning her that it’s “almost time for dinner.”
Joey wisely listens to Abigail’s father, leaving their manor-turned-house-of-horrors behind. After getting back into the same van that she and her now-dead colleagues used to get there, Joey unpacks her lollipop from the film’s prologue and drives away into the night. In doing so, she sends Abigail out in cheeky fashion — sucking on a piece of candy rather than another person’s blood. It’s an appropriately lighthearted conclusion to a film that doesn’t have much to say and is even dumber than it looks but which is also, to its credit, a whole lot of fun.
Abigail is now playing in theaters.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?
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