'Abraham's Boys: A Dracula Story" lacks bite
What did you do in the vampire war, daddy?
The subtitle of “Abraham’s Boys” (at least in the marketing materials, if not on the film itself) calls it “A Dracula Story.” But the opening words of Natasha Kermani’s movie say it takes place 18 years after the death of Count Dracula. How can you have a Dracula story when Dracula is long gone?
In fact, “Abraham’s Boys,” adapted from a short story by Joe Hill (“The Black Phone”), attempts to be both a horror film and a family drama, showing how the trauma of facing the undead looms like a shadow over a family many years later. It’s an ambitious and refreshing take on a familiar legend. Unfortunately, in execution, the film is just too slow and emotionally (if not physically) bloodless to engage the audience on either level.
The setting is a farm somewhere in rural California in the 19th century. Abraham Van Helsing (Titus Welliver of “Bosch”) is a Dutch doctor who has emigrated to America for a new life, with his ailing wife Mina (Jocelin Donahue) and sons Max (Brady Hepner) and Rudy (Judah Mackey) with him.
It is, to put a mildly, a fraught household. Abraham tends to Mina’s mysterious ailment, and lectures his sons about the evils of the world, evils that seem to be drawing closer as the railroad intrudes on their secluded existence.
Of course, anybody with any knowledge of Bram Stoker’s original story knows the name Van Helsing. He’s the most famous vampire hunter of all time, the one who dispatched Dracula. So the first half of “Abraham’s Boys” is basically the audience waiting for Van Helsing to reveal to his sons that which the audience already knows.
I think if the family drama had been stronger, the waiting wouldn’t have been so aggravating. But the performances are so quiet and reserved, the characters so thinly drawn, that we never engage with them. Hepner and Mackey are fine as the sons, living under the thumb of their father, but we never feel their confusion or growing terror. A couple of random nightmare sequences that Max has gives the game away that Kermani knows this section is moving too slowly.
Finally, Abraham reveals to his sons what he’s protecting them from. And the film does employ a pretty nifty reinvention of the Dracula legend, as the sons question whether their father really is a crusader against the undead. But it comes so late in what is only a 90-minute movie that its impact is muted.
Although there’s some gore towards the end, “Abraham’s Boys” isn’t scary at the least, and pure horror fans may be frustrated. Kermani’s decision to shoot the film in a boxy aspect ratio is an odd one; she may be trying to convey the claustrophobic nature of living in the Van Helsing household, but mostly it limits the visual interest of the scenes, and shortchanges the beautiful setting of the rolling California hills.
“Abraham’s Boys” certainly feels like a short story that has been padded out to feature-movie length. Unfortunately, all the padding seems like it’s on the front end, and by the time it gets to the meat of the story, the audience is struggling to maintain interest.
“Abraham’s Boys” is now in theaters. In Madison, it’s playing at AMC Fitchburg 18.