Abruptio Film Review: Can You Get Away With Murder?

In the psychological thriller Abruptio, no life is spared and no sin goes unpunished. What begins as a fantasy of crime without consequence descends into a harrowing reminder that our choices create ripples, and even the smallest decision can lead to devastation beyond our comprehension.

Movie Trailer:

At the age of thirty-five, Les Hackel is stuck living at his parent’s house, driving a broken car, working a dead-end job he hates, and if that wasn’t bad enough, his girlfriend just left him.

Just when it seemed like his life couldn’t get any worse, Les wakes up to find a bomb implanted in his neck. Now, whoever put the bomb there is sending him messages, telling him to commit vile acts in the name of saving his own skin.

While others showcase, they don’t have what it takes to kill, Les finds himself not suffering the same moral dilemma. To make matters worse, as his body count begins to rise, so do his rewards. Soon he finds himself in possession of a new car, a lavish house, and a pile of cash. Everything he never had the ambition to go after in life, and all he had to do was kill for it.

But as his tormentors’ requests become more and more sinister, Les has to finally ask himself how far is he willing to go and what is the purpose of all this killing. Driven to find out who is responsible for putting the bomb in his neck, and the countless other people he has met in his disturbing journey. Les embarks on a mission to discover the truth, a mission that will see just how far someone is willing to go when they have a gun pointed at their head.

But when he finally uncovers the truth, will he like what he finds? Or will Les find out that his actions due in fact have consequences?

Abruptio is a film like nothing you’ve ever seen before. It is a bloody and disturbing psychological thriller that explores the extreme lengths one is willing to go to survive when their own life is on the line.

Granted, there have been films that have explored a similar concept, such as The Belko Experiment, Ready or Not, and even the Saw franchise, which showcased the extreme lengths one will go to save themselves, even sacrificing someone else’s life. However, Abruptio takes this idea to a whole new disturbing level by using life-sized puppets instead of human actors.

These puppets are designed to look eerily human yet possess an uncanny quality. Some have blotchy, lifeless skin with bloodshot eyes, while others have a waxy, pale complexion like figures in a house of wax. This unsettling faux-human appearance hides their true inhuman nature beneath the surface, making their capacity for violence all the more disturbing and unpredictable.

While Abruptio may seem like a movie that takes the resulting carnage and devastation to a global scale, at its core, the film is really about the life-altering decisions we make and how one decision can have huge unforeseen consequences. Our choices create ripples that significantly impact other lives in ways we can never fully comprehend.

Despite the fact the film appears to resolve around Les, illustrating the idea that not only does he get away with these killings but is rewarded lavishly for them, receiving money, status, and privileges with each life he takes, in reality, the final message of the film shows how Les loses everything as a direct result of his terrible decisions.

We learn in the closing moments of Abruptio that Les was involved in a terrible accident and that he appeared to create this fantasy idea of crime without punishment, perhaps as a way of passing off the blame on others for his actions. But in the end, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t outrun his sins because his conscience eventually caught up to him.

Abruptio also leaves you with the important message of remembering that your decisions have consequences, and we must understand that, intended or not, our actions shape the reality we inhabit, whether we acknowledge it or not.