Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Story continues a beguiling custom of complicating the mythology of famed literary characters. Primarily based on Joe Hill’s quick story of the identical title, Abraham Van Helsing (Bosch‘s Titus Welliver) and his ft of clay are the main target of director Natasha Kermani’s affected person, grim horror flick, set 18 years after the occasions of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As with John Gardener’s Grendel or Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, Abraham’s Boys will not be making an attempt to recreate a narrative you already know; as a substitute, it gives a brand new perspective on one thing that has change into canon. Adorned with all of the anticipated Gothic trimmings — assume creepy dungeons and anthropomorphic shadows — however shot by way of with piercing, sunlit terror by cinematographer Julia Swain, Abraham’s Boys is a chilling reminder that the monsters “on the market” are not often as terrifying as those in our personal properties.
Abraham’s Boys
3.5
/5
- Launch Date
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July 11, 2025
- Runtime
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89 minutes
- Director
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Natasha Kermani
Merciless Means to an Unsure Finish
The story begins in 1915, after we meet up with the Van Helsings. Mina (Jocelin Donahue), Max (Brady Hepner) and his youthful brother Rudy (Judah Mackey) have traded their life in London for a distant residence within the Central Valley space of California. From the beginning, Kermani and Swain distinction the chilly, managed, and compact nature of the Van Helsings’ residence to the expansive, sun-baked area round them.
The Van Helsings have chosen to isolate themselves from people, bloodsuckers and everybody in between, and establishing pictures exhibit how awkwardly their property stands on this sun-scorched land. It is as in the event that they’ve introduced evil with them, slightly than fleeing from it. Swain often intercuts the land’s stunning protection with a second of gore or violence, corresponding to a golden-hour view seen not too lengthy after Abraham has used a scalpel to graphically carry out surgical procedure on an injured neighbor. It reinforces the movie’s message to be cautious of what’s introduced to us as proper and true — there are lacerations on this supposed personal paradise.
Nonetheless, for the Van Helsings, it’s a tranquil life. It is also the one one the boys have ever identified, though they get hints of their mother and father’ previous ordeals with the supernatural by way of Mina’s sluggish deterioration. She by no means totally recovered from her encounter with the Transylvanian vampire, and Van Helsing makes use of her sickness to take drastic, abusive and violent measures to safe their residence. This places him in battle with Max and Rudy, who stay distrustful of their father’s superstitions and as a substitute solely see how his delusions and guidelines are accelerating Mina’s descent into insanity and loss of life.
Max and Rudy are perceptive sufficient to know that there’s extra to what their father is presenting to them as reality, and it’s in witnessing their skepticism curdle right into a grisly rebel that Kermani’s movie casts its most gripping spell. It may be tough for films that tease a form of Schrödinger’s disaster — that’s, the place the core drama revolves round whether or not a menace is actual or not — to maintain that momentum. They typically really feel like they’re simply spinning their wheels, particularly when the horror is unseen. Kermani strikes out of that narrative cul-de-sac by ruminating on a much more attention-grabbing query: No matter whether or not the specter of Dracula is actual, does it justify Abraham Van Helsing’s cruelty, even when it’s within the title of affection and safety?
Abraham abrasively casts apart outdoors assist for Mina, and ultimately forces his sons to kill individuals their father swears are devilish — actions that immediate Max and Rudy to problem whether or not the supposed safety they get is definitely worth the abuse they obtain. On this manner, the movie situates its horror in witnessing a house — supposedly a spot of security — reworking into a spot of hazard. There’s a novel misery within the feeling of disillusionment taking maintain in a single’s coronary heart that is far scarier than any vampire chunk, as one turns to the individuals round them and realizes that they’ll’t be trusted.
Robust Performances Carry Welcome Nuance
Provided that Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Story roots its scares within the tortured interiority of its characters, it wouldn’t work with out performers that may faucet into that disenchanted register. Fortunately, the solid is greater than as much as the duty. Hepner and Mackey seize the sensation of being hollowed out and sucked dry by the fangs of parental tyranny, portraying Max and Rudy as boys who lengthy to flee from a physique that’s endured greater than any youth ought to bear. Welliver, in flip, wears Abraham’s traumas overtly, including nuance to the inhumanity that’s tempting to ascribe to him. With out exhibiting any of his backstory, Welliver depicts Abraham as a person who has seen the worst of what the world (and the world past) has to supply. In consequence, he needs to guard his household from experiencing those self same horrors. He garners sympathy as a father who loves and protects imperfectly, fueled by the agonies that haven’t departed from his bones.
Welliver is in lock step with Kermani in revealing the darkish facet of our heroes. It’s terrifying to witness Abraham uaing the identical crafty he probably used in opposition to Dracula in opposition to his family. And Donahue performs Mina with a measured insanity, refreshingly not devolving into widespread tropes actors may make use of when depicting psychological sickness. As an alternative, she roots her most spacey provocations and outbursts in a maternal tenderness. She needs to guard the boys from what’s occurred to her, however she doesn’t understand how her safety additionally suffocates them.
Its measured wavelength won’t be for all, however when seen by way of the prism of distressing household dynamics, Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Story works as a slow-burning story of the painful however needed journey of youthful deconstruction. It makes us query the veracity of the legends, erasing the “blissful ever after” of Stoker’s authentic novel to discover the darkish underbelly of Van Helsing’s heroism. Whereas some could discover it repetitive or inert, others can be haunted by the sinister mundanity of watching a household unit fracture. It is as if Kermani and her crew had been making an attempt to seize the maddening state of being the place actuality and nightmares blur collectively.
Abraham’s Boys will debut in choose theaters on July eleventh from Shudder and the Unbiased Movie Firm.