The uncanny valley is common ground for genre film. Blurring the lines between reality and the fantastically horrifying is often the name of the game, yet doing so in a way that doesn’t feel quite so formulaic can prove more difficult than people might imagine. At a time when we’re experiencing a windfall of original, independent-feeling horror fare in theaters and at home, Evan Marlowe’s ABRUPTIO is a stark reminder that things can always get weirder.
Currently playing at the 2023 Panic Fest, ABRUPTIO features a jam-packed cast voicing your worst nightmares—an array of life-size looking puppets. With everyone from Jordan Peele to Robert Englund to Sid Haig in what would be his final performance, ABRUPTIO should, at face value, be an easy sell. And to a degree it is, but what a face it has. Les Hackle (James Marsters) is a man stuck in a repetitive. cyclical rut in life. Working a job he hates, dumped by his girlfriend, living with his parents out of complacency, it’s the same dull pattern on a loop. But one morning he wakes up to find the back of his neck has been stitched; a bomb has been placed inside him and the only way to survive is to follow anonymously received orders. As he goes about his tasks with varying degrees of hesitancy. he begins to realize just how many people are in the same situation, compelled to commit violent acts on others in order to spare their own lives.
All that would be enough to build any movie’s tension, but, somehow that only scratches the surface of all that’s going on with ABRUPTIO. Like all the best nightmares, there’s far more at work here beneath the surface, and that surface is a slippery one. This film has no interest in lulling you into a sense of acceptance for its actions—in fact it spends a good deal of time reckoning with the moral consequences of its ever-weirder premise—but it does seem to have a vested interest in unsettling you in as many ways as possible while still making its point.
The way that ABRUPTIO chooses to depict things like mindless repetition and out of body experiences by populating the entire film exclusively with puppets is nightmarish, yes. So nightmarish it’s impossible to forget that what you’re watching are puppets, not people. They are designed in such a way as to haunt your dreams later, sure, but also seemingly to make us reckon with how we respond to the quite graphic violence on screen. Because we don’t see these characters as human people, are the things being done to them easier to observe, or do they still get a visceral reaction? A version of this question and the human tolerance for violence floats at the core of this film in unexpectedly timely ways.
Panic Fest has always been the place to bring the weirdest fare to the forefront, and ABRUPTIO is no exception. There are things about this film that make it almost certainly not a winner for everyone. but if you’re willing to step behind the curtain and consider the truly strange lens it asks you to look through, you just might find something well worth your time that will make its horrifying little home in your brain forever. “Everyone is a puppet” says the film’s tagline. How terrifying to imagine that might be true?
Tags: Abruptio, Christopher McDonald, Evan Marlowe, Film Festivals, Hana Mae Lee, James Marsters, Jordan Peele, Panic Fest, Panic Fest 2023, Puppets, Robert Englund, Sid Haig
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