ABBA on screen, from high camp to dark soul-searching

From 1977’s semi-fictional concert film ABBA: The Movie to this summer’s Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, the music of Swedish pop royalty ABBA has found a second home at the cinema. The eclectic history of the group’s songs in film showcases the multifaceted nature of their music, reflecting their long-standing reputation as a fun, frivolous pop band, as well as the more recent reappraisal of the ever-present dark aspects of their lyrics.

Fittingly for a group whose worldwide popularity was born on the Eurovision stage, ABBA’s most natural home at the movies is soundtracking camp performance and queer ritual. Stephan Elliott’s 1994 road movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert follows two drag queens and a trans woman on a journey across rural Australia in a bus they name Priscilla, facing interpersonal struggles and homophobic violence along the way. The final scene of the film sees Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce’s drag queens perform a show-stopping rendition of Mamma Mia to an audience including Weaving’s character’s previously estranged son. The exuberance of the performance combined with the yearning of the lyrics (“there’s a fire within my soul”) is emblematic of the combination of celebration and resilience that is at the core of much queer art — a perfect fit for a queer road movie where joyous liberation (at least partially) overcomes shared struggle.

Where Priscilla… showcases the hope of much of ABBA’s music, the use of SOS in Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, from 2015, exposes the lack of it. Based on JG Ballard’s dystopian novel of the same name, the film follows Tom Hiddleston’s Dr Robert Laing as he attempts to negotiate life in the titular building, where the rise in floor numbers represents a rise in social status. The eventual collapse of this micro-society is played out in a central montage soundtracked by the creeping dread of SOS, covered masterfully by trip-hop pioneers Portishead. The building’s debauched and bloodied residents roam the ransacked corridors to the sound of minimal synths and ominous drones. Any scrap of hope present in the original recording is scrapped, and the song is drilled down to its bleak core. The central lyrical plea is no longer directed to a lover, but to an imagined saviour of society — a blinking light calling into the void for help.

For many ABBA fans, the hyper-reality of the Mamma Mia films — where ABBA’s music accompanies the central characters through the melodrama of weddings, friendship and dubious paternity — is an amplified version of our experiences growing up with ABBA Gold as an ever-present companion. A more down-to-earth reflection of this can be found in PJ Hogan’s 1994 comedy Muriel’s Wedding — which, like fellow Aussie production Priscilla… utilises the duality of celebration and melancholy at the heart of ABBA’s music.

The film follows Toni Collette as Muriel, an ABBA superfan in the mid-90s when such a status was considerably less cool than it is now. Muriel is a misfit, tormented by mean girls from school well into adulthood, and possessed by a desperation for hometown escape that leaves her first in debt, then stuck in a visa marriage that is a far cry from her fairytale wedding day dreams. Throughout the film, Muriel’s two constant companions are her best friend Rhonda (played by Rachel Griffiths) and the music of her favourite band, whose songs soundtrack every bad decision, and every moment of joy — including a memorable sequence that sees the two best friends perform a full-costume version of Waterloo at a talent show, to the anger of their mean girl tormentors.

ABBA’s omnipresence in Muriel’s life is relatable to many of us, but it’s also a testament to the rich range of emotions and experiences their music has the potential to evoke and signify. They’re the perfect movie soundtrack — and not just for high-camp family drama in Greece.

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Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is playing on screens literally everywhere