Abigail epitomises everything that I find frustrating about the Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett brand. Their taste for suspenseful horror is so unerring and yet they seem to feel compelled to continually fall back upon a cheesier and more bathetic form of meta-horror, as if to demonstrate that they arent taking their capacity for craft too seriously. That craft is on full display for the first half of Abigail, which is easily the best segment in their career to date. The premise starts off relatively familiar – a group of mercenaries abduct the daughter of a millionaire without knowing exactly who has set up the heist, beyond their shared connection to Lambert, a criminal played by Giancarlo Esposito. While we get to know each member of this motley crew in time, our main point of sympathy is Joey, played by Melissa Berrera, a military doctor and recovering drug addict who has only lent her services to the abduction in order to make enough money to reunite with her estranged son. Since she didn’t know that the target was a child, she quickly bonds with the young girl, Abigail, played by Alisha Weir.

However, once the kidnappers arrive at their designated safe house, the action quickly shifts towards the jewel box crime narratives that have seen a resurgence in recent years. For one thing, the kidnappers start to scrutinise each other, starting with a terrific early scene in which Joey “reads” every other member of the troupe. For another thing, the crew now learn that Abigail is the daughter of Kristof Lazaar, a legendary crime lord. Worse, Lazaar has an infamous hitman named Valdez with an apparently superhuman ability to get into the most sequestered spaces. Gradually, the crew move from wondering how and when Valdez will get into the house to suspecting that Valdez might already be amongst them, and it is on that unsettling note that they started to fan out and explore every room in this enormous edifice. As in Knives Out, the film that kickstarted this return to crime chamber dramas, every room is a tribute to the power of mise-en-scene, cluttered with miscellaneous objects, although in this case the directors overlay it with an Argento-like sentience, culminating with the body-swamp that is later discovered in the basement. A preternatural sense of space lingers over everything, producing a remarkably emergent horror that sits somewhere between a heist, haunted house and country house murder myster, without quite conforming to any of them.

It’s only a matter of time before this emergent sense of horror crystallises around Abigail, who has been kept upstairs, chained to a bed, while her kidnappers explore the house. From the opening scene in which Abigail practices ballet on a dark empty stage (the site of her abduction), she has seemed somehow coterminous with the film’s looming spaces, especially once she starts to bond with Joey, who takes off her blindfold. In a brilliant twist, Abigail turns out to be a vampire, and so transforms from the collateral damage of her father’s empire to the heart of the entire enterprise. For the kidnappers soon learn that Abigail herself is Valdez, and that she staged the kidnapping in association with Lambert, also a vampire. She’s done so partly to dispose of her father’s enemies, and partly to impress her father, who seems to have little affection for her, but mainly because she loves power: “I like playing with my food.”

In theory, that’s an incredible twist, proportionate in every way to the shifting spatial parameters of the film’s world. But rather than draw it out moment by moment, the directors transition fairly quickly to a vampiric bloodbath. Narrative developments still ensue, as when another member of the kidnapping crew allows Abigail to bite him so that he can become one with her necrocorporate empire, but for the most part the second and third acts are just gross, an escalating demonstration of prosthetic pyrotechnics that leave the exquisite suspense of the opening gambit far behind. In fact, the finale goes some way to undermining the twist – I couldn’t believe that Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett chose to actually bring in Lazaar, played in cameo by Matthew Goode, given that the whole thrill of the second act transition was that Abigail was already in some sense bigger than her father and his whole corporate enterprise. Once Abigail and Lazaar are in the same space, they’re both divested of what made them scary, meaning that the directors don’t really have anywhere to go excerpt a fairly limp allegory of parenthood and a soppily sentimental alliance between Abigail and Joey. It’s as if, at the very moment when the film’s atmospherics were at their most gorgeously modulated, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett felt compelled to glibly deconstruct and mock them, an issue with all their films, but especially with this one, at once their best and worst release.