Review: Absentia (2010 Indie Horror Film). Starring Katie Parker, Courtney Bell, and Dave Lavine. Directed and Written by Mike Flanagan.

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Summary: Absentia is a member of the quiet, lingering "Drone" subgenre of horror (see also: Dawning), and a fair example to show around. Combining the best of micro-budget energy with an interesting, if improperly explored, mythos, makes for a good night's watching, as long as you are not expecting either definites or high octane moments.

BLOT: (30 Oct 2012 - 12:09:34 PM)

Review: Absentia (2010 Indie Horror Film). Starring Katie Parker, Courtney Bell, and Dave Lavine. Directed and Written by Mike Flanagan.

Seven years ago, Tricia's husband, Daniel, disappeared with no explanation and no easy answers. Now her younger prodigal sister, Callie, has come to help her file for death in absentia paperwork, to move to a new place, to take care of an [at first] unexplained pregnancy, and to generally get moving with a new chapter in her life. As Callie settles in, she starts noticing strange things that Tricia has overlooked, including abandoned objects and people showing up in a nearby pedestrian tunnel. As Tricia's life melts down, and lost things come back accompanied by horrifying truths, Callie tries to help but finds her own past in constant question. Things slip between the cracks, down to the lost underneath.

After watching Absentia [via Netflix], I quickly gave it five stars, but I wouldn't say it is a perfect movie. Definitely one I will watch again and talk up and think about and all that. It fits into the drone horror spectrum, slow and low-key scene building focusing more on characters than boogeymen, accompanied by long photography and literal drone music. In most drone horror, the character elements are a petri dish to germinate weird happenings, leading to an ending that, while having a definite climax, embraces a murky resolution: maybe it's all simply a metaphor about the collapse of erstwhile sanity bulwarked against an uncaring universe. Add in a dash of Ligotti/Barron weird fiction (with a hint of Machen) and you have a movie that is about two sisters who both ran away from their previous lives—one through a young marriage and one through drugs—trying to sculpt a semblance of life on the other side—through counselling, religion, relationships, or symbols of moving on—dealing with the reality of missing people and missed opportunities.

It is extremely bold for it's reported $70k budget*, with strong leads sporting generally effective natural dialogue and enough subplots—the pregnancy and the parallel aspects of cases similar and different—to make for a heady mix held up by excellent scene staging with a few harsh gotchas that come from unexpected places. Sure, a few bits of the dialogue would have been reshot or cut from a longer, higher budgeted film and there is no shortage of moments that you have to wonder if this is how the real world would have responded to this, but that's always the great unknown debate and most of the choices make sense within the film itself. More suited to my sensibilities is the way the movie both traps itself and frees itself by holding to a [possibly unintentional] geometric structure where the first half is built up around one thing, the first half of the second half is built up around another, the first half of the fourth quarter introduces something else, leading to a series of quick reassessments of what is to be done in the very last bits. Even if the movie isn't really about what is happening in the movie, it feels in like it takes too many steps to turn back and too few to go forward, ending either two scenes too soon or two scenes too late, that the glory of its misdirection leads to maybe one too many, or maybe one too few, false turns on the hunt for answers. Overall, though, a Good movie that you should probably see, especially if you are interested in the same sort of weird fiction that I am, with most of its faults overcame by the passion and talent of the cast and crew and an appropriate melancholy feel to embrace its central thesis. I'll be on the lookout for Mike Flanagan in the future, and have high hopes for him.

* Note, I base this off of IMDB.com's numbers, which sometimes are accurate and sometimes are not.

Horror Movie Review

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: October 2012


Written by Doug Bolden

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