Absence (2013)

Beautiful, moving film.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Absence is pretty much absent of any real excitement. Absence begins with Evan, a young film student who is documenting his sister Liz and her husband, whose 7-month old baby fetus mysteriously vanished from his sisters body. The trio escape the questioning from police and media attention and head off to a cabin in the woods. They, nor the doctors have any explanation for what happened to Liz. The documentary shooting is real but sloppy for a films sake. No-one holds the camera twenty-four-seven and you do put it down when needing to do something (as is what happens in the film). It can be annoying for the viewer's pleasure to watch a wall while hearing a conversation in the background.The central mystery of the disappearance takes a while to get into and the scares are far and few between but it does have the odd scene and shot that was worth the wait.The ending was expected once it happened but I enjoyed it all the same. If you're not a fan of found footage, you may not like this movie but if you are you'll want to give it a go.

Doctors are baffled when an expectant mother wakes to find her nearly-to-term pregnancy apparently disappear overnight. Police investigate the situation as a missing child, and only her husband and brother trust her version of events.The movie starts out with some of the most wild shaky cam ever put on film, and then turns into an amateur documentary complete with the wonderful "found footage" style of camera-work. Each time this technique is used it gets more and more irritating, and by 2013 the creators of these films should know better than to use it unless they have a darn good reason.Perhaps this film is called "Absence" because it has an almost complete absence of horror elements. Most of the movie is just footage of flirting, drinking, hanging out. Maybe ten minutes really involves anything scary or supernatural. One could argue this effectively builds the characters, but it does this at the expense of any narrative a viewer would give a hoot about.

This movie was 95 percent boring, monotonous, tedious nothingness. There were stupid jokes, juvenile stunts and blase dialogue. This movie was 3 percent blurry images and fuzzy blue lights and some screaming. Then there was 2 percent of something somewhat close to interesting. And that 2 percent wasn't worth getting through the 98 percent of muck. Overall, it's a waste of time. *Spoiler* The fact that there is zero explanation as to how this woman lost her unborn baby is ridiculous - was it cut from her or simply evaporated from her belly? The whole hour and change was a huge waste of time. The first person who reviewed this film here on IMDb must have been part of the crew or cast or is simply simple. Go elsewhere for some entertainment.

**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.