Yep, it's me...LOL... I am the one doing commentary on the stream and getting married. Thank you for the well wishes!
ok... SPOILERS!!!
See, what I love about this movie is how it challenges your views of morality. Not only are we faced with the question of whether Abby is simply manipulating Owen or if she truly cares for him the way he does for her, but the answer leads us to question our own morals.
See, if Abby does in fact care for, if not love Owen, then Abby becomes this complex character. She becomes this perpetual child, forever trapped physically, and it seems mentally in a 12 year old's body and mind. She understands right from wrong, that killing is wrong, yet her survival instinct, her desire to continue to exist drives her to kill or ask others to kill for her. She represents a paradox in which killing is wrong, yet, the circumstance she is in is seemingly not of her own doing, and therefore we are left to feel her pain, to sympathize with the fact that struggles with trying to be good while living as a creature that the world around her inherently views as evil.
If she is simply manipulating Owen, then she is still complex, but less than if she is not manipulating him. I am not 100% sure that Abby does love Owen, though there are definitely points in the movie where it is implied that she certainly feels for him. Owen figures out that Abby had kept Thomas as her caretaker from the photos of them when Thomas was a child. Right then and there, Owen realized that Abby was looking to replace Thomas with him. Whether Abby has true feelings toward either Thomas or Owen is irrelevant IMO. The fact is that she needs a caretaker, and Owen fit the same MO as Thomas when he was a child... small, frail...basically he had "kick my ass and stuff me in a locker" written all over him. Both Thomas and Owen are the type of characters that have low self esteem, will very rarely stand up for themselves and do as they are told when they are told to do it. The scene when Abby says, "are you going out?" and Thomas says, "Do I have a choice?" implies that he already knows there is no need to even be told what to do...he is defeated(and has been for years) and simply does what is expected of him...just as Owen has done with his mother and the bullies who push him around. To me, it is clear that Abby's manipulation of Owen began when she first said to him, "We can't be friends", simply to get him asking "why?" and to garner his interest.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Abby is evil either. I'm saying she's a survivor and does what she must to continue to survive. If that means manipulating someone into killing for her, or doing the killing herself, then she does what she must. I'm also not saying that Abby is without feeling or emotion. It is definitely implied at times that she certainly cared for Thomas, at the bare minimum, being grateful for his lifelong dedication to her. It is also implied, in the bedroom scene(when she's laying down with Owen) that she wants things to "stay the same". This could be her manipulating him, because by pushing Owen away, it only makes him want to be around her more. It could also be true tenderness, insomuch that she truly doesn't want Owen to have the life that Thomas had because of her. The fact that she allows Owen to leave with her on the train, however, tells me that even if she didn't want Owen to have the same life as Thomas, Abby's survival instinct is stronger than any emotion, therefore making her need to manipulate stronger than those emotions.
What we know is that Owen cares enough about Abby that he will love her regardless of her "not being a girl". What we don't know is if Abby will leave Owen if he won't give kill for her to provide her blood. I'm not so sure she really does love him more than she simply needs him for survival. She can't continue to kill because she'll eventually be hunted. What better than always having a fall guy?
