ABRUPTIO: A Beacon of Originality
In a world of sequels and reboots, we all pine for something fresh and sometimes we need to remember that “this has never been done before!” can also be taken as a threat.
The controlled and manipulated person as an agent of murder and mayhem trope has plenty of places to take us and enough to say, and it has been well trod in flicks like Suicide Squad, 30 Minutes or Less, Mockingbird, and about 20% of every Saw flick, but Abruptio takes it to strange new places.
Our protagonist Les (voiced by James Marsters) finds himself with a bomb implanted in his neck after a night at his only friend Danny’s (Jordan Peele) home – and the folks pulling the strings give him vicious orders through both his phone and other nearby screens. Les’s situation is clear: perform these increasingly involved acts or we will blow your head off. Les has lived what has been up until now a deeply mundane life oscillating between the depths of addiction and the tediousness of recovery – with seemingly not much to lose in his bad luck life, Les still fights vigorously for what little he has left.
Moving from task to task Les finds an uncomfortable romantic relationship with a grieving and terrified woman (voiced by Hana Mae Lee) and meets others forced to perform on the same cruel stage, including a stand-up comedian (voiced by the late great Sid Haig) and an obsessive-compulsive man (voiced by Robert Englund).
In Abruptio, the medium is the message. Much like Anamolisa or Through a Scanner Darkly before it – choosing a non-traditional medium that drives home the primary subtext of the story frees the film’s text itself to not dwell excessively on it. With every character depicted with puppets, the point about our locus of control being such a fragile, easily hijacked thing is continuously and artfully on display. By doing it this way Abrupto avoids being preachy, heavy-handed, or otherwise bogged down with a responsibility to explicitly drive home this point. This makes it a much more welcome and effective overarching theme to unpack.
Is Abruptio a horror movie? It depends on what that means to you.
Growing up I had a recurring nightmare with gnarled and horrifying figures I couldn’t quite identify – but they stuck in a repeating way few other nightmare beings did. When I was older one day in a library going through books on who knows what, I saw the figures depicted right there on the page – the Spitting Image Puppets. I had seen a special with them in it when I was too young to voice my displeasure and they lodged themselves in my fear center for good.
So for me, yeah these grotesque nonfelt puppets made me sit in a disquieting and essential fear the entire run time of this flick. But your mileage will vary depending on your relationship to fleshy puppets if Abruptio lurches out past psychological thriller with disquieting imagery into the traditional bounds of horror.
Having a bland Everyman as the protagonist, when done well, allows your projection on their blank screen. When done wrong it comes across as boring. Les is more the latter as he shuffles along the film grasping at relevance without interrogating himself or his situation much if at all. This fits his character perfectly as he is a man who has allowed life to happen TO him rather than something he engages actively in.
This blandness is especially true when the rotating supporting cast around Les, which seems to be there basically so we aren’t stuck with an internal narrator, are worlds more interesting than Les without exception.
I’m a firm believer in the axiom that “therefore” is always better than “and then” in terms of how one plot point connects with the next in a story, Abruptio is a constant stream of “and then” – never “therefore”. But like Les’s blandness, this normally bad thing serves the story incredibly well in the fact that Les can’t get a grasp on what’s happening to him and he’s being pulled from moment to moment with all the details becoming increasingly slippery. In this way the frustrating “and then” traps us in the same sort of beleaguered space of being dragged along by a plot with which we can neither pin down nor get ahead in that way Abruptio is like a foam-rubber-covered Beau is Afraid.
What’s most clever in Abruptio is that just outside the story we are presented with is an immense, and engaging global story unfolding and we barely get tiny glimpses of it when our point-of-view characters turn on their TVs briefly or in the background as they drive between locations. Having a small arthouse quirk fest story occurring in the corner of a world experiencing a blockbuster summer tent pole film plot is bold and original. It’s like if Being John Malkovich happened entirely in the middle of Independence Day or Lost Highway happened during The Purge and you don’t get to see anything but brief flashes of the major event unfolding just behind the characters working out their small, weird, wild situation.
But isn’t that just how real life works? The world goes through incredible upheaval change and fear while we’re locked into our desperate moments without time or clarity to shift our focus.
The puppet effects are consistent and original – the full-body views of the puppets just jammed on top of a whole person in the wide shots are continuously hilarious to see. These effects also provide a welcome intermediary distance from some deeply disturbing scenes.
What came across to me most with the puppets was how Les, the most used and most present puppet showed so much wear around his mouth and anywhere else his puppet is routinely moved. Having the most screen time tracks he’d be the most used-up prop of the bunch. These cracks and lines just kind of stood out emblematically of what the character himself was going through in his internal journey.
Was this an artistic choice or was it just the limitations of the budget for a puppet thriller made over the better part of a decade? I’ll leave that to you to decide but I think our wrinkles of wear resonate the same as we face our own increasingly taxing daily tasks.
I’d love to see a documentary of the near-decade process Abruptio underwent – how the horror con marquee guest cast was brought into it and how close this film was to the original vision that began it once stretched out that far. In a perfect world that documentary would also be done with puppets made to resemble all involved.
Abruptio is absolutely midnight movie fodder – something to watch with a raucous crowd who have all already made the jump in the suspension of disbelief and expansive taste necessary to engage with this film fully, not enclosed in a small car at a wonderful drive-in with the angry and confusing sighs of your family who now question your ability to make plans for the family as your soundtrack like I did.
Who is in control of us and what do they want? Abruptio demands we ask this question of ourselves with great casting, gore galore, and a plot that is as jarring as the hideous puppets are themselves.
