Absence gives away a lot of the plot in the poster art. Absence belongs in the found footage genre, but its fictional director intended to use the footage in a documentary about his pregnant sister’s incubating baby disappearing with no clue how it happened. Everyone is suspicious that his sister and brother-in-law are hiding more than they claim, and the fictional filmmaker wants to show how normal and awesome they are. Naturally they decide to get away by going to a cabin in the woods and record every moment of their vacation.
I love the found footage genre, but I don’t care how close you are to your sibling, after losing your baby and being suspected of murder, you would not tolerate someone sticking a camera in your face and playing practical jokes on your husband. I never could get past the annoying and intrusive fictional filmmaker regardless of all the other things that worked in Absence. What worked in Absence?
HUGE SPOILERS
Absence effectively uses the found footage genre to casually adhere to the tropes of alien abduction, and if you watch through the credits, your patience will be rewarded. They come at night. The camera captures their image and their craft’s lights, but because the fictional director is not reviewing the footage as he films, he never sees it. When he finally does directly encounter and record the aliens, he does not remember, but physically the family feels the results the next day by being in pain or exhausted. Absence implies that the locals suspect what is going on by one local woman’s reaction to the car malfunctioning or weird sights in the woods and keep a terrified distance once their suspicions are concerned.
Unfortunately Absence does not tie all the elements together, and the human characters are poorly characterized. Is the fact that their parents died when the siblings were young a clue? If weird crap keeps happening at night, why do you wait until night to try and escape? And what was the deal with the weird things in the woods? That wasn’t part of common alien folklore, right? If aliens’ technology disrupts ours, how come the camera worked most of the time?
If you really like alien abduction stories, give Absence a chance, but stay away if you have a low threshold for annoying people.
