Review—Absentia

I first heard about Absentia early in 2011; a low-budget horror movie funded partially by Kickstarter funds that was already starting to garner some great word of mouth. I generally try not to get too worked up and excited by word of mouth for low-budget horror movies, but as the year wore on I was only hearing more and more good news about this movie.

It never did get a wide release. It played at a film festival here in Seattle, but only on one night, and I happened to be coming back from California. Had I raced, I MIGHT have been able to make it from the airport to the movie, but I didn't try.

Well... fast-forward to last Saturday, and while fooling around on my Xbox, I realized that Absentia was available for rental through the Zune store! Delighted, I plopped down to watch the movie...

"You see me?"

...and 90 some minutes later, after it had finished, walked shuddering over to the computer and pre-ordered the movie on DVD from Amazon.com.

Absentia is not only genuinely frightening, but genuinely GOOD. Great acting, great direction, great writing... It's refreshing to see a horror movie where the scares and chills are the result of craftsmanship and not just loud music stings accompanying cat tricks. There are no cheep scares in this movie... only legitimate ones. And in between the scares... a slowly building dread and tension that actually for real had me on the edge of the seat. No joke!


Absentia is about a woman whose husband went missing mysteriously 7 years prior. But after her estranged sister moves in to her house to help her prepare to move to a new place and finish the paperwork for proclaiming her husband's death in absentia... things start getting weird and spooky. Is she just having lucid dreams and hallucinations... or is her missing husband's disfigured ghost growing angry and increasingly vengeful?

Sometimes... the hype is right. Absentia is my favorite movie of 2011, and a great movie to kick off the new Bigfoot Country's reviews!

Absentia is...

• ... my favorite movie of 2011.
• ... the scariest movie since the first Paranormal Activity.
• ... about far more than mere ghosts.
• ... honestly frightening and relentless in its horror.
• ... graced with one of the most haunting final scenes I've seen in a movie for a long time.
• ... incredibly well-written and well-acted, to the point where a few scenes actually made me tear up! Not many horror movies can claim that!

Grade: A+