Review of Absentia (2011) by Pamela D — 08 Aug 2012

ABSENTIA (2011) INDEPENDENT.

WRITTEN and DIRECTED BY: Mike Flanagan.

FEATURING: Katie Parker, Courtney Bell, Dave Levine, Morgan Peter Brown, Justin Gordon, James Flanagan.

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL HORROR.

TAGS: mystery.

PLOT: In a neighborhood plagued by mysterious disappearances, two sisters fall into an incipient enigma emanating from an eerie pedestrian tunnel.

COMMENTS: Absentia's deceptively simple plot draws us into its dark, foreboding odyssey from the very first frame. A quiet, brooding horror movie, this independent mystery-thriller punctuates an aurora of gradually escalating dread with some genuinely startling chills. This isn't an easy task to accomplish when horror audiences have see it all. While Absentia isn't an edge-of-the-seat nail-biter, it manages to provide some frightening interludes which are truly scary.

In Absentia, two sisters Callie (Parker) and Tricia (Bell) cope with having Callie's missing husband Daniel (Brown) officially declared deceased so that Callie can move on with her life. But is Daniel truly dead? He's been missing without a trace for seven years. Despite needing to settle his estate, Callie clings to the hope that Daniel is still out there somewhere, and that there's some reasonable explanation for his disappearance.

Canvassing the neighborhood with missing person posters, Callie and Tricia finally give up trying to find Daniel, but in the process become aware of numerous similar cases. There's something funny going on in the community and the deepening puzzle of vanishings increasingly seems to be linked to an unsavory pedestrian tunnel underneath a nearby freeway.

As Tricia is inexorably drawn to the dank passage again and again while jogging, unsettling events occur which bring to light the fact that the neighborhood has a long, disturbing history of misfortune dating to well before the construction of the tunnel. In the underpass, Tricia finds the belongings of people who were reported missing over the past century. She encounters a prostrate man lying in the tunnel who disappeared years ago, but when she returns he is gone. The police don't believe Tricia and when they find articles belonging to missing persons in her possession, they suspect Tricia is a serial killer.

The riddle careens into an even more cryptic conundrum when Daniel re-materializes, disoriented, terrified, amnesiac, and wearing the same clothes as when he disappeared half a decade earlier. A menacing, bloody fury accompanies Daniel when he returns to recover from his ordeal at home. As the force manifests a dark presence, it sucks Callie, Daniel and Tricia into a morbid maelstrom of doom.

Absentia is an outstanding independent effort, exquisitely well-produced on a small budget. Devoid of tired formulas, the overall feel of the production is one of form following function. In the recent tradition of the best non-Tinseltown horror projects in its class, Absentia is dark, ponderous, and unnerving,.

Absentia is devoid of cliches, stereotypes and over-exposed actors, making it fresh and unique. Performances are solid and credible. Creative camerawork immerses us in the story from the perspective of its protagonists. Absentia's sophisticated tension is free from the typical splatter and nudity of conventional horror movies, putting it in the rare category of fright films which are all-ages appropriate while maintaining a scary, hard edge.