Horror Off-Season: Absentia

So I have no idea where I first heard about Absentia, or why it took me so long to get to watching it.  I'm now grateful to the Netflix shipping glitch that delivered the DVD to me a few days early because after the mind-bending story and gnawing questions of Prometheus and the brutality and left-field ending of Asylum Blackout... Absentia was a breath of fresh scares.

Absentia is an indie horror movie written and directed by Mike Flanagan and released in 2011.  And it is one of the best put together indie movies I've seen.  It's not without flaws and you can definitely tell it didn't have much of a budget but the movie looks excellent.  The soundtrack is practically non-existent but it serves to accentuate the uncomfortable sparseness of the movie.

The basic plot here, trying not to give too much away, is that 7 years ago Tricia's husband Daniel vanished without a trace.  7 years later Tricia is still living in their apartment directly across the street from a pedestrian tunnel under an overpass.  She's devoted the majority of her life over the last 7 years to searching for Daniel, as evidenced by the opening shot in which a very pregnant Tricia replaces tattered Missing Person posters around the neighborhood with fresh ones.  Tricia's sister, Callie, arrives to help her finalize the paperwork declaring Daniel "Dead in Absentia" and move to a new place.  The emotional strain is causing Tricia to have nightmares and hallucinations of a ghastly Daniel with sunken eyes and a gaping silently screaming mouth.

During the days Tricia makes arrangements while Callie goes jogging.  On one of these jogs she almost trips over a beat up emaciated stranger played by Doug Jones.  This is Walter and he's the first hint we get of a larger plot involving the tunnel.

This is how most of the rest of the movie plays out, Tricia holds the plot thread of Daniel while Callie holds the plot thread of the tunnel.  The threads are mostly separate until the sisters come together near the end.  After a massive reveal/twist at about the halfway point, the movie becomes a very different kind of supernatural thriller.  This 2nd half focuses more on straining the character relationships that have been developed.  The movie also starts to tie in existing fairy tales into its mythology, giving it a real urban legend quality.  The movie ends with a heroic sacrifice that unfortunately was for naught and closes with a similar sequence to the opening bit with the Missing Person posters, making everything nicely circular...although really depressing.

I really like the scares in this movie, there were pretty slick looking and the editing worked well.  There were lots of shots where it seemed like there were two Daniels and that was pretty cool.  I also really liked that they weren't punctuated by the sound track in that face-smack way a lot of movies do.  I loved the scares in Insidious partially because of the soundtrack, but here it would have seemed silly and out of place since the entire movie is presented with a massive sense of restraint when it came to focus, lighting, and soundtrack.


Absentia isn't a perfect or amazing movie, but it is really good and a nice change from the increasingly violent horror mainstream.  It's a great tragic story with well executed scares.  The camera work and soundtrack create a atmosphere of brooding depression and strained emotions that really gets under your skin and sits with you for a while.  But the cop characters are so awkward they almost don't seem like people.  There is an odd subplot involving Doug Jones' character and his son that I wish had gotten more fleshed out, especially given the time they spent with it in the first half of the movie.  I felt cheated when it got downgraded to "supporting evidence" status.  It's well worth watching and the scares were so good they almost kept me up at night.

--PXA