Abruptio (2024) Movie Review: A Compelling Exercise in Craft Laid Over an Incoherent Narrative

It is limiting horror movies to only carrying a social or thematic message. Sometimes these films can simply exist as visceral showcases. Horror movies can showcase human craftsmanship in practical effects, gore, special effects, etc., eliciting immediate reactions from the audience that have also become one of the genre’s trademarks.

To that end, “Abruptio” by Evan Marlowe is a marvelous work of craftsmanship. The entire film is done via puppetry, with a mix of live puppetry and life-size puppet work. There might also have been actors wearing puppet masks to maintain continuity in a film doubling down on its discontinuous sensibilities.

A middle-aged man, living with his parents, stuck in a dead-end job, and having broken up with his girlfriend of two years, gets a text message revealing that a bomb is stuck in his neck. If he doesn’t want to be blown up, he would have to complete missions assigned to him that would resort to killing, and that too in an extremely gnarly fashion.

The salient feature of “Abruptio” is the intent of the puppetry. The character of Les Haskel (James Masters) could be classified as a sociopath. As the character is played by a puppet, and voiced by the soft timbre of Masters, it creates a visible cognitive dissonance as one cannot discern the facial tics that would make the viewers realize the character or actualize the character’s motivations. This dissonance is present within the actions depicted in the film itself, where the violence and gross-out visuals result in a simultaneous mix of shock and awe, as the movie renders itself so strange one cannot look away from the events occurring on screen.

Or at least that would have been the intention if the film’s narrative had been a coherent one. Contrary to this film simply being a craft exercise, it also belies the ambition of being a psychological horror with surrealism coating over sci-fi. You couple that with the puppetry, and the gaps in the narrative actually should feel like a feature. However, Marlowe’s narrative renders itself as more of an action in edginess, with some misogynistic sentiments towards women that stand out even more as a result of a lack of coherence. The themes of alienation, and discomfort with one’s lot in the world, get thrown off rather quickly once the film becomes more interested in following Haskel around as he sloppily executes missions, and converses with characters that scream of surface-level understanding of the human condition.

The film’s choice to shift to full-body horror and creature features is fascinating, but it also feels like one of a handful of ideas Marlowe and his team are throwing to the wall and seeing what sticks. The few times where the film’s wacky tonality works is in the police interrogation sequence, with the police chief Richter (voiced by Christopher McDonald) asking Haskel to confess, even bringing in a lawyer to bamboozle Haskel to the cause, and interrogating him using the electro-shock technique. But this sequence is later brought back to introduce a revelation in the narrative that feels like an attempt to have a more resonant and pat end to very disjointed storytelling. The ending could be read as the film highlighting the subconscious attempts to rationalize horrific acts, but the film never actualizes it effectively.

Abruptio” thus works very well as a showcase of seven years of work of puppetry depicted in full bloom, aided by voice acting by genre stars like the late Sid Haig, Robert Englund, James Masters, Jordan Peele, etc. It creates a film whose visuals are equally compelling and discomforting but fails by a narrative whose ambitions exceed its grasp.