‘Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Story’ Review: An Intriguing but Sluggish Postscript for the Count’s Nemesis 

Plenty of horror movies have shifted the focus from vampires to vampire hunters, imagining an underground network of stake-drivers combatting the elusive breed of bloodsuckers. Sometimes the two sides overlap, as in the “Blade” films. “Abraham’s Boys” has the gist of an original angle that goes straight to the primary source of modern vampire mythologies.

Here, the protagonist is Dutch undead expert Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, who’d been called to England to fight a supernatural nemesis in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula.” That polymath, famously played by everyone from Peter Cushing, Laurence Olivier and Anthony Hopkins to Willem Dafoe (in last year’s “Nosferatu”), is now a recluse in the New World, hiding out from spectral pursuers 18 years after he’d helped orchestrate the Count’s extinction. 

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The twist is that fear of reprisal has turned this learned man into a paranoid tyrant, holding his family hostage in joyless isolation at a remote farmhouse in California’s Central Valley. He’s ostensibly protecting them from a menace whose nature has been kept secret from two young sons. In writer-director Natasha Kermani’s adaptation of a short story by Joe Hill (who is Stephen King’s son), their finding out dad’s truth at last only awakens doubt. Has their father truly been protecting them all this time, or is he himself the real “monster,” controlling their lives for no reason beyond irrational fanaticism? 

It’s an interesting idea, as certainly the domestic control freak is at least as frightening a species as some ghoul of the imagination. But that concept’s exploration proves less than fully satisfying in a feature so slow-burning it never quite catches fire. Intriguing and atmospheric enough, “Boys” ultimately feels overstretched even at just under 90 minutes. Horror fans lured in by the premise — as well as the advertised subtitle “A Dracula Story,” which does not appear onscreen — may emerge irked that their patience goes unrewarded by much in the way of actual horror content. 

A brief prologue, set in 1915, finds an exhausted woman (Fayna Sanchez) walking alone on a country road at dusk. A passing horseman ignores her plea for assistance before she’s attacked by a shadowy figure — one we assume is connected to a certain ageless Transylvanian aristocrat. Not far away, Van Helsing (Titus Welliver) gets welcomed home after a short trip by wife Mina (Jocelin Donahue) and their children. The couple arrived at this far-western destination after stints in London and Amsterdam, hoping to get a safe distance between themselves and fanged peril.

As Abraham tells his eldest, teenager Max (Brady Hepner), he fears the “same threat has followed us from the Old World to the new.” That evil’s approach may be getting expedited by encroaching railroad construction, whose workers (two played by Aurora Perrineau and Corteon Moore) are camped out nearby. The father warns that mother Mina, who survived the Count’s thirsty attentions before the century’s turn, could still be susceptible to the “unholy illness” she was exposed to then.

And indeed, this Goth-looking, neurotic anomaly in a sun-bleached landscape soon takes to her bed, weakened and terrified. When their stern father again briefly absents himself, the boys’ roughhousing leads to younger son Rudy (Judah Mackey) entering Abraham’s forbidden office, where he and his brother make a highly disturbing discovery at the film’s midpoint. Upon returning, their dad must provide a grisly “lesson” to his offspring that explains much. Or does it? For Max in particular, his parent’s lifelong humorless severity looks more and more like malevolent delusion under a cloak of puritanical righteousness. Can you trust any authority figure who excuses murder as “God’s will”?

It’s a powerful conflict, not to mention one of perpetual real-world relevance. But it doesn’t get very thoroughly explored in Kermani’s screenplay, which teases with occult aspects that become red herrings, then doesn’t provide the alternative rationale of quasi-religious hysteria much definition, either. Perhaps such detailing wasn’t in the original story by Hill (who also penned the basis for the “Black Phone” films), but this feature treatment needs more fleshing out than the director provides. 

In contrast to the tight mix of expectation-upsetting ideas and suspense mechanics in her 2020 first feature “Lucky,” which was written by star Brea Grant, “Abraham’s Boys” is spare both aesthetically and in terms of incident. That works well to set up a milieu of bleak social segregation under a harsh patriarch’s thumb. The near-square aspect ratio utilized by Julia Swain’s cinematography echoes “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” in visualizing an oppressive psychological environment, while at the same time exploiting the beauty of the California countryside (though it’s actually Ventura County locations here, standing in for Central Valley ones). The design team evokes life 110 years ago via modest, effective strokes. 

But despite those skillful trappings, the story soon feels ponderous. Its occasional goosing by nightmare sequences only briefly enliven characters that remain one-dimensional, and pacing that drags en route to an insufficiently explosive climax. Welliver, best known for the “Bosch” series, bears down so hard on Abraham’s priggishness that we never really glimpse the lunacy or fear that might make him a tragic figure. The always welcome Donahue is allowed a more mercurial emotional range, but too little scripted substance for it to have much impact. The juvenile actors are competent if likewise underserved. Among briefly-seen support players, only Jonathan Howard gets something more fully developed to work with, in his single sequence as an old family acquaintance who shows up late to make a very specific plea.

As the celluloid universe spun from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” continues to accrue remakes, spin-offs, addendums and miscellany, “Boys” does provide one potentially compelling footnote. But its execution feels like a missed opportunity. We’re left ambivalent about having followed Van Helsing all the way to America — not because he brings terror with him, but because he turns out to be kind of a bore.

“Abraham’s Boys” opens in limited release on July 11, with streaming access on genre platform Shudder planned for later this year.