By Clara T.

At threaded fingers comes the daybreak of David and Meg’s relationship, grasping each other in hope for an easy dinner when their Jewish and Catholic families collide at last—a prayer for the journey ahead. Scenes apart, the introduction of Abby and Benjamin is not as ginger. She urges him to go inside her parents’ apartment, becoming cordless when he distances himself for a smoke. Abby—the middle child in the family—is never given a fair shake in Daniel Robbins’s film Bad Shabbos. She is caught in the push and pull, never finding true support.

Daniel Robbins, a director known for the horror films Pledge and Uncaged, seems to be pivoting away from his usual terrain with Bad Shabbos, which partly opens in appearance as a Hallmark-esque film about a family gathering for a warm holiday dinner. Yet something is clearly off. Framed as an interreligious parable, Bad Shabbos attempts to say that familial strife can be resolved in the face of sin—even murder. Although Robbins blatantly implies there will be no “good shabbos” in this story, could it be too much to ask for good direction?

While Robbins presumably set out to make a Hanukkah family movie, it is in fact a murder comedy—one floating with offensiveness and thoughtlessness. Here, the tension is meant to lie between matriarch Ellen (Kyra Sedgwick), who sweetly condescends that Judaism is “a household plant” passed down through generations of women, and almost-daughter-in-law and laborious convert Meg, whose efforts to swing from the Catholicism she was raised with to her fiancé’s religion, Judaism, are likened to taking “online courses in gardening.” They interact as foils in symmetrical frames that capture the generational gap dilemma in religious communities—centered the way Wes Anderson might.

By contrast, the woman in this hereditary line—Ellen’s daughter Abby (Milana Vayntrub)—is largely neglected. Robbins overlooks the actual strain between mother and daughter, even though Abby is the girlfriend of the murdered man who cheated on her. While Abby’s older brother David, her younger brother Adam (Theo Taplitz), and her father Richard (David Paymer) grieve with her following the death, Robbins falls into the stereotype of ignoring the middle child.

Abby is the true compass of the Bad Shabbos ensemble, even when Robbins makes heroes of everyone but her. Robbins turns the doorman Jordan (Method Man) into the concluding savior when he impersonates Abby’s dead boyfriend at the dinner table to avert suspicion—kissing Abby to increase believability, without her consent. One of the few tender moments is when Abby, wordless, conveys her sorrow, revealing she had known her boyfriend was cheating all along. That is the singular mystery revealed—if anyone came in expecting a murder mystery.

The family members are all losers in the end, but at least they are closer to one another—except Abby. While David supports Meg, Meg struggles for Ellen, Jordan aids David and Richard, and Richard and Ellen baby Adam—what kind of support is it if it takes a murder to realize Abby’s suffering?

Robbins’s rise in the comedy genre is positioned as a Messianic Age or a Second Coming of a directorial debut—but it is everything but. Much like Bad Shabbos unites everyone but Abby.