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Funereal Plots
Horror Cinema reviews

Matthew M. Bartlett

Abruptio

Writer/Director: Evan Marlowe

Les Hackel is a kind of sad-sack everyman. He works at a job where his main task appears to be stapling blank pieces of paper together. Post-breakup, he lives with his nagging mother and defeated father. He finds stitches in the back of his neck after consulting with a similarly afflicted friend, who informs him that a bomb has been implanted in his neck, and with the threat of violent death, he and others are manipulated to commit brutal, violent crimes.

Oh, one thing: Les and the other characters are portrayed by realistic looking, life-sized puppets in a real-world setting. James Marsters, Jordan Peele, Robert Englund, and the late Sid Haig provide the voices.

Abruptio is a movie for people who are sick of the current crop of ponderous, darkly shot horror; of half-assed, crowd-pleasing attempts to merge horror with humor. It’s for people looking for something different, but not just different for the sake of being different. There is a point to all the absurdity here, and some meaning behind all the absurdity, but it takes a secondary role to the gory and sometimes surreal mayhem. The performers play it straight through the dark absurdities and the unfolding whack-a-doo plot, and the script doesn’t insult the audience by being too obvious.

There’s corrupt police, a deceptive Eden, and a grinder that turns people to meat—blood and gore abound, and it’s somehow worse that it’s all happening to these puppets.

If I have a gripe, it’s that the ending has been done before to great effect—spoiler alert—in Brad Anderson’s The Machinist, for one. However—and this is a big however—the conclusion redeems itself literally in its very last second, a true blink-and-you-miss-it reveal that brings it all home. Stunners like this are too rare in movies.

Fusing the concerns and themes of Thomas Ligotti and Philip K. Dick to literary (but not cloyingly so) effect, Abruptio uses the uncanny valley—the puppets are rendered in remarkable detail to the point that they’re almost grotesque—to startling effect. Abruptio is the best, most inventive and daring horror movie of 2024.