ABSENTIA

Dir./Wri. MIKE FLANAGAN; Music. RYAN DAVID LEACK; Starring. KATIE PARKER, COURTNEY BELL, DAVE LEVINE, JUSTIN GORDON, MORGAN PETER BROWN, JAMES FLANAGAN, SCOTT GRAHAM, IAN GREGORY, DOUG JONES, CONNIE VENTRESS; R.T. 91 mins; 2011, USA

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Daniel Riley (Brown) has been missing for seven years, and his wife Tricia (Bell) is ready to move on with her life, preparing to have him declared dead in absentia.  Then her sister Callie (Parker), a recovering drug addict, comes to stay with her, and old feelings are stirred up for the siblings – Callie becomes obsessed with an underpass tunnel in the neighbourhood, which seems to hold strange, foreboding significance for some of the locals, while Tricia starts to imagine Daniel is haunting her.  Then something truly unprecedented turns both their lives upside down …

WHY IT’S LOST: While it marked the feature debut of Mike Flanagan – writer-director of (much-deserved) cult horror hits such as Oculus, Hush and Netflix’s recent breakout smash series adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, soon to return to the fertile creative lands of Stephen King’s imagination (after the underappreciated Gerald’s Game) with this autumn’s adaptation of The Shining’s sequel, Doctor Sleep – this was only really a hit during its EXTREMELY limited release through a variety of 2011 film festivals, winning some small acclaim and a slew of awards but subsequently crawling in WAY under the radar on its release to frustratingly vanilla DVD and VOD.  Then again, this is a seriously micro-budgeted indie (largely funded on Kickstarter to the spell of just $70,000) with a very low-key mumblecore vibe and seriously slow-burn pace that certainly wouldn’t have been to everyone’s tastes anyway …

WHY YOU SHOULD DISCOVER IT:  Thing is, despite its VERY humble beginnings, as debuts go this is an absolute BLINDER. I first came to Flanagan through Oculus, but I stumbled across this not long after, and I was INSTANTLY impressed by just how much of his brilliantly dark, edgy intelligence and consummate skill for intense, knuckle-whitening suspense and skin-crawling atmospherics was already very much in evidence.  Flanagan frequently makes a virtue out of the severely limiting trappings of a tight budget, and here he played a wonderfully inventive game with what we CAN’T see to really ramp up our sense of unease, even downright TERROR, while the ultimate nature of the central threat, once revealed, is both spectacularly original and downright fascinating even at its most repulsive.  The cast may be made up almost entirely of unknown talent (Doug Jones is pretty much the only familiar face here), but they’re far from amateurs – Katie Parker and Courtney Bell make a compelling central pair, their familiar-but-strained on-screen relationship effortlessly selling them as real, flesh-and-blood sisters, making it VERY EASY INDEED for us to invest in them, while Dave Levine is likeable but complex as personally-invested local cop Ryan Mallory, and the director’s own brother, James Flanagan, delivers an impressively twitchy, edgy turn as a potential local serial killer.  It may be a slow-burn affair, taking its time to get going while it sets up the story and gets to know its characters, but this is a film that works its way under the skin with insidious ease, while we’re never quite sure if the icky supernatural threat is real or just in Callie’s head, the consistently tricky narrative throwing us plenty of impressive twisty curveballs and ramping up the uneasy paranoia before dropping a powerful downer on us with the bleakly open-ended climax.  Brilliant, devious and thoroughly astonishing, this was a magnificent debut for one of the best young talents operating in horror cinema today.

Absentia (2011)

Director - Michael Flanagan, Cinematography - Rustin Cerveny

This was a First Time Watch thanks to the Summer Series. It had been on a list for awhile since I'm a Mike Flanagan fan. I enjoyed what this movie was doing and you can see the early makings of where he will end up now being one of my favorite modern directors. What do you think of this early film from him?

‘Absentia’ (Blu-Ray) Review

Looking at the new Blu-ray release of Absentia is something of a re-visiting for me as I have reviewed it before.  With a positive viewing last time I was looking forward to watching it again and seeing if the film still had the same effect as before.  With added special features and an upgrade to Blu-ray Absentia is getting a release it deserves and with Mike Flanagan having so much success with

‘Absentia’ (Blu-Ray) Review

Looking at the new Blu-ray release of Absentia is something of a re-visiting for me as I have reviewed it before.  With a positive viewing last time I was looking forward to watching it again and seeing if the film still had the same effect as before.  With added special features and an upgrade to Blu-ray Absentia is getting a release it deserves and with Mike Flanagan having so much success with