Film Review: Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Story

Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Story
Director: Natasha Kermani
Tea Shop Productions, Illium Pictures
In Theaters 7.11.25

The story of Dracula has been done to death at this point, so much so that any truly scary element to the story has largely been bled dry, and most new versions fail to really sink their teeth into the material. When I started out this paragraph, I honestly thought vampire puns were a can’t-miss idea, but I see now that I relied too heavily on the belief that my concept was clever and not enough on smooth and skillful execution. It’s unfortunate that director Natasha Kermani isn’t as willing to learn from her mistakes as I am, and her all too similar approach to Abraham’s Boys results in a vampire Western that just sucks.

In California in the early 20th century, Max (Brady Hepner, The Black Phone, The Holdovers) and Rudy (Judah Mackey, Hard Miles) are just teenagers living a seemingly quiet life as the sons of the local physician, Dr. Abraham Van Helsing (Titus Welliver, Argo, Gone, Baby, Gone) a Dutch immigrant who led the family — his wife, Mina (Jocelin Donahue, The House of The Devil, The Last Stop in Yuma County) and the boys — around Europe, including Amsterdam and London, before bringing them to America. Abraham is a relic of another era: strict, unyielding, and obsessed with unseen terrors. Their childhood is a regimen of shuttered windows, garlic at the threshold, and cryptic lectures about the things that go bump in the night. But as adolescence sharpens their curiosity, the brothers begin to uncover the grim truth behind their father’s madness. Whispers of a creature he once hunted, whom Mina believes is still after them. And the realization that their upbringing was preparation for a war. As secrets, lies, truth and perhaps even madness start to come to light, Max and Rudy face a harrowing choice: run from the legacy that’s twisted their lives — or step into the nightmare their father has been training them for all along.

Based on the 2005 short story by Joe Hill (Locke & Key), Abraham’s Boys starts out with the mouthwatering premise of bringing Bram Stoker’s immortal legend to the American West, and subverts expectations with a highly intriguing twist that fundamentally changes the nature of the whole story, making us question everything we think know about Dracula. So why is it neither entertaining nor interesting? Simply put, it’s a weak script full of plodding, repetitive dialogue and character types rather than characters. The story moves at the pace of an asthmatic ant who is trying to walk home carrying two week’s worth of groceries. It’s also remarkably cheap looking, despite being shot on the ARRI Alexa. Cinematographer Julia Swain (The Wrath of Becky) is no doubt hampered by the meager budget, but she captures none of the atmosphere one would expect for a Western or a gothic horror film, and it’s all flat and sterile, with the boxy 1.33:1 aspect ratio giving the feeling that we’re watching an rejected episode of Little House on the Prairie. Now, at this point it probably sounds like I have a personal grudge against this movie and set out to trash it, but that’s far from the case. In fact, even after finding the first hour utterly laborious, the revelation of where the story was actually going was intriguing enough that I was prepared to reevaluate everything if it took off from there and made good use of this smart and provocative concept. Instead, I got unintentionally hilarious decapitations that brought to mind Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

The performances are uniformly weak, with the normally reliable Welliver, who is often seen playing tough cops or criminals from New York, Boston or Los Angeles, feeling out of place and miscast as Dr. Van Helsing. Donahue is worse as the former Mina Harker, alternating between listlessness and histrionics. The titular boys try their best with underwritten and ill-defined characters, and had the script and the direction managed to really bring some human dimension to Max, the whole might have been moderately interesting.

Abraham’s Boys is easily one of the most forgettable and skippable films to come along in 2025, and the only level on which it truly succeeds is in proving the old adage that if you have talent, determination and vision, you just might be able to make a movie. And if you don’t have any of those things, just make a half-assed horror flick, do it cheaply, and you’ll probably make money off of it. Make sure to bring some cloves of garlic with you to the theater, and not to ward off vampires — it’s just the only hope to add any flavor to this miserably bland concoction. —Patrick Gibbs 

Read more SLUG Film Reviews here:
Film Review: The Fantastic Four: First Steps
Film Review: Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight