Bad babysitters: "Abigail"

With original ideas apparently at a premium, the movies have taken to smashing pre-loved concepts together, much as prehistoric Man did flints, in the hope of creating sparks. The process is being prominently demonstrated by Adam Wingard in Screen Three's Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire; over in Screen Five, however, we find arguably the process's nimblest practitioners, Wingard's V/H/S shooting buddies Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, collectively known as Radio Silence. This pair previously gave us 2019's Ready or Not, which had a lot of fun mashing up the meet-the-parents comedy with the slasher-splatter movie; their latest Abigail sees them and writers Stephen Shields and Guy Busick splicing the heist movie with an altogether different horror genus. It's the old story of criminals who get more than they initially bargained for, in this case a ragbag of muttering oddbods first seen in balaclavas - the best medium-budget Universal money can buy: Melissa Barrera (survivor of the directors' iffy Scream reboot), Dan Stevens, Kevin Durant, Will Catlett, Kathryn Newton and the late Angus Cloud - who've been contracted by third-party Giancarlo Esposito to kidnap a pre-teen ballerina (Alisha Weir) with the aim of squeezing a ransom out of the girl's millionaire father. If you've seen the trailer, an example of producers spoiling their own movie, you'll already know young Abigail is plenty capable of defending herself, which means the film's opening half-hour plays as slick preamble with a side order of set-up. Yet smart playing ushers us past the clanking of plot mechanics, while also fanning out - like cards on a table - a set of personalities you're almost sad to see getting torn up. Torn up they must be, though - that 18 certificate's not for nothing - because Bertinelli-Olpin and Gillett rightly understand their best chance of striking sparks is to give these elements a resounding ketchup-bottle thump: the red stuff goes everywhere, with one particular effect that bears repetition and never gets old or tiresome or any less marvellous to behold.

Actually, Abigail is relatively sparing with the grue up until the point all hell breaks out - it gets stored up, for a more spectacular splurge - and that time allows us to see just how attentive these filmmakers have been in matters of construction: they both need and want their bricolage of old-movie odds and sods to withstand even the fiercest of hammer blows. There are precedents here. Abigail shares something of From Dusk Till Dawn's wriggly, borderline serpentine shape, but crucially not its winkingly ironic tone, allowing it to land some emotional beats involving the Barrera character's relationship for her son; for a while, I also wondered whether we were watching Home Alone re-envisioned from the perspective of the Pesci-Stern characters. Yet its most apparent virtues are those of the stronger Saw films: inescapably tight plotting that gets only tighter still upon the revelation of who exactly all these strangers are, and some quietly excellent and unnerving production design (by the versatile Susie Cullen). The so-called safe house to which our anti-heroes escort the girl turns out to be deceptively cushioned, with a whole host of dark spots, secrets and shadows lurking behind the artefacts. (Trust me, you don't want to see what's in the basement.) In confining itself to the one big house, Abigail is visibly operating within the same parameters Ready or Not did - not necessarily a limitation, given how enjoyable the latter film was - but it also holes up with an even better ensemble, who quickly win us over in the guise of weary capitalist footsoldiers, screwed over by management and eviscerated by the job in hand. It's a rare horror movie where you sort of want everybody to survive for potential sequels, notably the spacey, suggestible Newton, the dimly uncomprehending Durant - Elon Musk x Hulk - who gets major laughs just from being more outwardly terrified of his pipsqueak charge than anyone, and the cherishably sarcastic Stevens, who in a parallel universe would be enjoying Bradley Cooper's career, but in this one appears ecstatically happy to have become the thinking person's Jeff Fahey. If the Screen Actors Guild had an award for Best Doomed Souls, this shower would win at a canter.

Abigail is now playing in cinemas nationwide.