October Horror Challenge #23 "Absentia"

This is such a quiet little movie. It says so much with very few words. It begins with a woman walking with her head down and you see her walking up to these electric poles and there are missing person posters stapled to the poles that are afraid and tattered and old and she takes them down and puts them in a bag and puts up new posters and so without really saying anything you kind of know book This woman's looking for someone and he's been missing for a while but she's not giving up hope she's still looking for him and that says everything you need to know right then about that character in one shot whoever wrote the script is pretty genius and whoever acted in this movie does a pretty damn good job of it. Later on, there's a scene where the main character's sister has come to stay with her presumably until the baby comes Oh I forgot to tell you the main character is pregnant isn't that a trip she's pregnant and her husband has been missing for 7 years, and now after a one-night stand she's 8 months pregnant? that's really sad. But she calls her sister and her sister comes to stay with her until the baby comes to help out and we learn a lot about the sister without her having to say much like we learn when she asked for a glass of wine her sister says this isn't going to violate your sobriety is it And that's how we find out that the sister was a drug addict but she's in recovery now and she's clean and she's been clean for a while so that's a good way to introduce that topic. And then we see the younger sister the former drug addict one kissing a picture of the ultrasound of her little niece or nephew and tucking it behind a cross nailed to the wall and she says God bless you too little niece or nephew and that's how we find out that she's a Christian They don't preach at us They don't throw anything in our faces This movie just quietly lets people interact and lets the story flow from that and I really appreciate how well they pack an emotional punch into little details like that. speaking of mental illness, the thing about it is that you never know whether the things your mind is showing you are real or not and that can cause problems obviously but I don't think that's always portrayed well in movies it looks corny and silly and campy and stupid most of the time. This movie portrays it very quietly by showing our main character having nightmares that her husband comes back and he stumbles toward her with his arms out and he tries to hurt her and she's scared and she wakes up screaming and she has this dream a few times throughout the movie so she doesn't recognize when her husband shows back up that it's real because she thinks she's just dreaming or having a vision She only knows it's real when other people react to it. In that way this movie is a lot like "they look like people." I forgot how sad this movie is I mean I remembered everything that happened but I forgot that it's really just sad and devastating and depressing when you think about it and I feel really bad for the poor characters and I want to hug them all Well maybe not all of them We can skip hugging the villains in this movie cuz they're creepy but this is a very good movie it's a very quiet horror movie It doesn't have a big budget but the way it gets around a big budget is very clever and it manages to deal with big budget problems in small budget ways that work. When the big reveal finally happens it's not much of a reveal cuz the movie doesn't have a budget to show you what happens but it it lets you figure out what happens through subtext and I appreciate that the movie doesn't consider me stupid but thinks that I'm smart enough to figure things out on my own and I do. So this is my recommendation for a little slow burn horror movie but it's also very sad and tragic and devastating and emotionally draining so I probably shouldn't have watched smile to and then they look like people and then this because I'm not giving myself much a break to mourn for all those poor dead characters that we have now. It's all good though. I love real horror movies that affect me in real ways, and i wouldn't change that for the world.