ABSENTIA
DVD. Second Sight.

There are myriad ways in which Absentia could’ve gone wrong. An indie horror flick that sits neatly within the mumblecore genre, it’s combination of understated, semi-improvised dialogue and ambiguity could’ve easily sent it spiralling down the rabbit hole of pretension and smugness that ultimately scuppered much-hyped examples like The Woman and A Horrible Way to Die. That the film succeeds is a tribute to writer-director Mike Flanagan’s balancing act that allows the film to develop rounded, believable characters while still creating a decidedly weird atmosphere with some startling moments of horror.

Courtney Bell plays Tricia, a pregnant woman who is about to have her husband, missing for seven years, declared dead ‘in absentia’. Arriving to support her is younger sister Callie (Katie Parker), a not-quite recovering drug addict and Christian, and before long, strange events start to unsettle both women. Tricia is haunted by visions of her missing husband, while Callie is drawn to a tunnel near their home, where desperate, seemingly homeless people – or lost souls – seem to make appearances. As Callie discovers that the tunnel has a long history of being link to disappearances, events become more and more unsettling.

To say too much about the story would be to unleash spoilers. This is very much the sort of film that you need to go into cold. Suffice to say that there are multiple explanations for events offered, and while the film implies an unnatural, disturbing answer, it also offers more prosaic explanations for everything. It’s fitting for a film that keeps its horrors brief, often barely seen (or unseen) – there are shock moments, but you often won’t know exactly what the shock is showing.

Central to the film’s success are the cast – naturalistic, convincing and far removed from the one-dimensional pretty people normally found in genre movies, the characters and their relationships seem entirely genuine. Worth mentioning too is the soundtrack – a low key, creepy, unsettling score that hints are horror without hammering the point home.

Absentia is that rare thing – a restrained, realistic horror film dealing with supernatural fears. Leaving more questions than it answers, it’s a real gem that deserved better than a relatively unheralded straight-to-DVD release.

DAVID FLINT

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