Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

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

Isbel A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

rageinblack I feel confused, usually, I have nothing against low budget movies and I've seen some outstanding ones, but this one failed to catch a level of greatness in my eyes. Partly also because of the hype that the reviews here created, I thought I was in for a hidden gem...I liked the concept of the story, it was intriguing to a degree, yes, but the movie lacked in the execution and to me, it was pretty boring... the dialogues, the pace of events and even the music... They could've made indeed a much more entertaining movie out of it, that's for sure.

cjbad9 Very re-watchable. The score is great and will stay with you. Hella eerie the entire time. The soundtrack is so way creepy and some movie nerds might even consider it a character in its own. Very similar use of music as that of Requiem for a Dream. O man the very ending is so shockingly awesome. Nothing really jump out thrills but all around very horror suspenseful. I now get some thrills in public by asking people if they can see me. Its hard to tell if its real or not, much like most stories about awesome torture daemons. See it yo! With the lights off!"Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them." ― Charles Bukowski

znegative I had heard that 'Absentia' was rather good. But I also kept hearing about how low budget it was. I don't know why, but lately I've developed a sort of preference for very sharp looking movies, so I was a little reluctant to even give Absentia a shot. However, I was running out of free films to watch on Amazon Prime, so I decided, 'what the hell'.The premise of the film is relatively simple. A pregnant woman's fiancé (or maybe husband- not too important) disappears, and seven years later she is still coping with the loss. Meanwhile, her younger sister, a drug addict, comes to stay with her. Throughout a series of events we come to find out that a nearby tunnel seems to be a portal to another dimension, which plucks people from the neighborhood, making them disappear.I honestly don't like ghost movies, and really anything supernatural is usually a turn off to me, although I do like films that deal with the occult (Kill List is perhaps my favorite modern horror masterpiece), so I was really not expecting to like this movie. However, the same director did Occulus and Hush, both of which I thought were relatively good enough, so I decided I'd at least give the movie 20 minutes of my time. After all, I really have nothing better to do (I live in Ohio).Well, I almost turned it off in the first 5 minutes. 'My God!' I thought, 'This looks like something I could have made!'. Luckily I stayed with it.Absentia's strong points aren't so much in it's style or it's plot. It's a character driven film. At times I forgot Absentia was even a horror movie at all, so immersed was I in the plot that I felt as if I was going through the same confusing and unfortunate events that the characters on the screen were. I cannot stress enough how good the acting and the directing in this movie is. I highly recommend it-IMO it's far better than Oculus or Hush.

Cyberknight Masao Kawata 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.