Simply Perfect

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

In the beginning there were two sisters. One of them was a runaway drug addict. The other one was pregnant out of wedlock with a man she has no contact with, whilst her husband has been missing for seven years. Ok, so the beginning of this film does NOT prepare you for what you're about to see. It starts of all realistic and the relationship between the sisters is well-established. When the one sister (Courtney Bell) has to sign the Absentia papers, she starts seeing horrible visions of her husband, but this is only just the beginning of the nightmare that unfolds. This is a truly scary and creepy film and I won't spoil the ending. The film is completely unpredictable and things go very wrong after the halfway mark. This is a must-see film. The cast was very good and credible. Notably, I thought Morgan Peter Brown was very good as the disappeared husband.

This movie could have been better in a lot of ways. The camera was shaking whole time, cinematography was not well done, it seemed amateur. Most of the scenes were unnecessarily long and that made the movie boring. Although acting part was quite good, the soundtrack was dull and repetitive. There could be one more soundtrack.Other than those issues, movie was quite enjoyable. The story line is well documented. The movie lets the audience the mystery and the other life to imagine, it does not solve it. It rather claims that anything, any occurrence can be perceived and interpreted differently. I liked that it left some part of the story to my imagination. Another thing that is good about this movie is it is a good psychological thriller. It depicts well how fears disturb humans, and how people get stuck and isolated in their fears. P.S.: There is not gore but there are jump scares. :)

This film is about missing people. While there are several plausible explanations for most disappearances, there are a few that just sound too unnatural... So, what if some evil force is stalking, hiding itself where we can't look, like just behind the corners? And what a better corner is there to hide than on the edges of our limited three-dimensions (or four, if one wants to count in the time)? This is not a new story, with examples coming from the Asian dream-eaters to H.P. Lovecraft's inter-dimensional terrors and the contemporary cenobites, but amazingly, there are not many good pieces exploring this subject, at least, not on the horror shelves. There are many fantasies, like "Labyrinth" and "The NeverEnding Story", comedies, like "Ghostbusters" and "Beetlejuice", science fictions, like "Doctor Who" series and "Event Horizon", and even some thriller/dramas, like "The Adjustment Bureau". On the horror genre, there are films like "Phantasm" and "Poltergeist", the latter actually more entertaining than scaring, and a lot of not so successful ones, like the "Hellraiser" series, which carry some good new ideas, but doesn't manage to "raise hell".In "Absentia", the actors start cold, the first lines sounding very rehearsed and unconvincing, like people on reality shows pretending there are no cameras on them. As the film goes on, though, they gear up to a more steady pace.Shot using photographic cameras 5D Mark II and EOS Rebel T2i, "Absentia" isn't the kind of film meant to jump scare (although there are some), it's more on the psychological build up, what it does well. The short depth-of-field given by the cameras intensify the dramatic visions of "evil". The plot could be more elaborated, having a lot of drama filling in-between action scenes, making it less enjoyable for those looking for more scares.

It's unusual to see a horror/supernatural movie that isn't packed full of clichés, but Absentia makes a good attempt to be something a little different. The plot is simple enough: a woman has her husband declared legally dead after an unexplained absence of seven years, but then he mysteriously reappears, apparently with little memory of events. Unfortunately, he seems to have brought something nasty back with him.What makes the movie different, is that the 'nasty' -- whatever it is -- is seldom apparent. We get just the occasional glimpse. It seems to be associated with a spooky tunnel, but in ways that never become clear. In fact, at the risk of being a spoiler, I think I've just summarized the entire movie.This isn't an action movie, and it has few outright scary moments. Very little happens that is out of the ordinary -- most of the story focuses on the odd, rather strained relationships between the central characters, all of whom have things to hide and may -- or may not -- know more about events than they let on.From start to finish there is an atmosphere of brooding menace, which becomes increasingly intense as the story unfolds. Everybody is scared of something, although it is never made particularly explicit whether the nasty thing actually exists in objective terms, or is just a figment of one or other characters' overwrought imagination.Unlike many modern horror movies, this one does actually have a proper ending; that is, events come to a clear conclusion. It's not a conclusion that makes a whole heap of sense, in narrative terms, but at least I didn't get the impression that the film-makers just carried on until they had enough stuff for a movie, and then went home.All in all, one of the best horror/supernatural movies I've seen for a long time.