Absence (2013)

I love this movie so much

Too much of everything

Please don't spend money on this.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

First of all, I'm a huge fan of the genre and I have to say that this movie is without a doubt one of my favorites. I really don't get why it has such a low rating here or why people are so disappointed with it. In my humble opinion, all the people who were so disappointed, simply did not get the idea of the movie. The tension in the movie is building up slowly and that's what I love about it. I hate it when they show you the monster in the first 10 minutes of the movie,then I lose interest. I envy all the people out there who still haven't seen it. The actors are doing a great job. I just love everything about this movie, I recommend it to all of you, alien nerds.

**Contains Spoilers**It's a well known adage that the scariest part of a movie is what you DON'T show. While this can be true, a lot of filmmakers lately (particularly ones with low budgets) take this to mean that fuzzy footage and static is just as scary as an actual scary image. If you're the type who gets chills when TV snow appears on your home movies, you'll love this movie. Everyone else: give it a miss. I'll agree that the scariest part of the story is what you don't know, but for there to be a scariest PART of a story, there must first BE a story. What we have here is lazy storytelling. It starts good, with the missing baby. Then there's 45 minutes of completely band vacation footage that doesn't progress the storyline at all. Then there's about 10 minutes of interesting events which, following a good plot construct, should lead to a climax. But there is no climax. Or conflict for that matter. There's just leading up, followed by an end. And when I say end, I don't mean a story ending or a resolution. The credits just start rolling. If you absolutely NEED to know what happens, here's a rundown of events: "Doctors are baffled when a young expectant mother wakes to find her nearly to term pregnancy has disappeared overnight." First of all, know that her pregnancy has absolutely zilch to do with the movie. The movie opens in the hospital, showing the young mother crying and a nurse speaking angrily to some cops. The grief from this event is what prompts the young couple (and the woman's brother) to take a nice relaxing trip to a summer cabin. I say relaxing almost sarcastically here, because from the absolute start, the brother is making stupid comments, mostly directed at the husband. I guess he thinks that the way to make his sister feel better is to constantly nag her husband about everything from his car to his shoes. The nagging is constant, it's not clever or witty, and at one point he even goes so far to tell her that her husband will leave her to become an alcoholic. All of this "jokingly." Over the course of the next hour, the three meet a local girl, and there is a montage of vacation scenes. They play scrabble, go swimming, drive through town, and have a cookout. This occurs on different days. The only creepiness is shown at night when:The camera turns itself on at night revealing lights/screaming that no one seems to remember in the morning. The vacationers notice a bright light off in the woods that they idly remark on before completely disregarding. The wife gets nosebleeds. Two of them. One's pretty bad. That's it. In the last 10 minutes, you get all the action. Once again, the brother awakens at night to hear screaming and lights from his sister's room. He runs into the hallway and bangs on their door before falling unconscious (somehow turning the camera off.) The next day, no one remembers anything and they have a cookout. The wife falls lethargic and when her husband goes to comfort her, he notices a lump the size of a thumb running up and down her arm, under the skin. The local girl becomes terrified and runs away. The husband insists that they visit a hospital, but the wife says she is tired, so they all just go to sleep. (?????) That night, the lights and screaming come again, but this time the brother manages to knock down the door. He sees the husband hanging suspended in the air above the bed. As soon as the door comes down, the husband drops, hitting the bed frame. At this point, everyone falls unconscious again and there are no focused shots for the rest of the movie. They wake up in the morning to discover the wife is missing. They drive all over town to look for her. They don't find her, but they do find their local friend. For some reason the camera focuses on her feet as she insists that she hasn't seen the wife and that she's sorry. It is clear she knows something terrifying, but she says nothing. The brother angrily gets back into the car and they drive off into the wilderness, eventually finding the wife in a pine barren. She appears catatonic. They decide to drive home, for some reason still not seeing the need to visit a hospital. As they drive home, night falls. A light suddenly appears in front of the car. The husband gets out and fires some shots into the darkness. A few seconds later, he is thrown into the windshield which shatters, destroying all visibility. The camera is now filming in total darkness. You can see vague shapes in between bouts of static. For a second, you can see the sister being apparently pulled from the car. Then there is a shot of the car from above. The camera then falls to the ground, and a couple seconds later, the brother lands beside it, dead. That's the end of the movie. So, what happened to the baby? Or the mother? Why take a 7 month old fetus? Why not wait 2 more months? Are the aliens following them? If so, why does the local girl seem to know something? The baby was taken from a family in a town hours away from where she lives. Why can the aliens erase memory, but haven't figured out how to erase a video camera? Why start the film with a missing baby if the baby has nothing to do with the plot and never re-appears? These are the parts of the non-story that you don't know.

through most of the movie, i had the feeling that i was zapping between different channels showing: a) a family reality with 4 participants: sister , brother , sister's husband and brother's girlfriend (most of the time i watched this channel) b) a seven months pregnant who mysteriously wake up without being pregnant anymore c) video definition of a douchebag (a low intelligence man behaving ridiculously who believes that he is the center of the world). he belonged in the category of those who put a camera in your face and speak in the microphone from the moment they wake d) something between paranormal activity(1,2,3,4,5) and blair witch project(1999) (i didn't watch this channel for more than 15 minutes)so don't expect chainsaws cutting (slowly but surely) through faces, legs etc (no stabbing and the only drop of blood that comes to sight is when the ex-pregnant nose bleeds) don't expect to laugh only in the first minutes (the douchebag can't stop messing with his friends throughout the film) so if you are in a mood of saying 'not much horror for me today' and you want to go to the rest room while the movie is playing and you can laugh watching a prick annoying and filming his company and also want something paranormal in the horizon then you have a movie to watch.

I read the reviews and waited for the film to pick up but all it did was p**s me off. The slow pace did allow you to connect to the characters but as I waited for the tension to build the film ended. don't waste your time with this rubbish movie, you'll have more fun staring at the wall. I recently watch the conjuring and truly enjoyed that. I saw this recommended and hoped for similar thrills but feel I wasted over an hour of my life. I hate to write negative reviews but I hope to save you the same fate as me and would suggest to avoid at all cost. There were a couple of points when I thought it might pick up so I hung in there until the end and even after the credits just in case, but nope.... it was p**s poor to the end