Review: 'Abraham's Boys' delivers a dark drama under the cloak of a vampire thriller, with a striking performance by Titus Welliver

Like Dracula’s cape, writer-director Natasha Kermani’s brooding thriller “Abraham’s Boys” comes cloaked in the trappings of the vampire myth — but the monster beneath is something else, creating a dark drama about loyalty and madness.

Taking a short story by horror writer Joe Hill, Kermani sets her drama in California’s Central Valley in 1915. It’s here, we’re told, that Abraham Van Helsing, the famed vampire hunter who drove a stake in Dracula’s heart 18 years earlier, has settled after fleeing the specter of vampires in Europe. Van Helsing (Titus Welliver, familiar to fans of “Bosch”) teaches his two sons — teen Max (Brady Hepner) and 12-year-old Rudy (Judah Mackey) — algebra and reading, while he also tends to his ailing wife, Mina (Jocelin Donahue).

Yes, Mina — known in Bram Stoker’s story as the wife of Jonathan Harker, and the object of Dracula’s eternal desire. Kermani’s script suggests an unfortunate fate for Jonathan, and that Van Helsing and Mina have created a life together, now threatened by the seeming return of the demons they fought in London and Amsterdam.

At least that’s the story Van Helsing has told Max, and the dark history he has kept from Rudy until now. As Mina’s condition worsens, and Van Helsing grows more secretive, Max starts to wonder how much of his father’s Dracula story is true.

The storytelling is spartan, with only a few side characters — such as Elsie (Aurora Perrineau), a mapmaker for the railroad that’s coming to end the Van Helsing family’s rural solitude. The focus is on the Van Helsings as they prepare to confront the evil that’s coming, as Max wrestles with Rudy’s question: What if something is already inside?

The highlight of “Abraham’s Boys” is seeing Welliver, a character actor who usually plays gruff cops or shady criminals, dig into a hard-edged, enigmatic character like this. Van Helsing, as a figure of literature and film, is more familiar with death than most, and Welliver helps us feel his acceptance of that painful fate.

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‘Abraham’s Boys’

★★★

Opening Friday, July 11, in theaters. Rated R for bloody violence and grisly images. Running time: 89 minutes.