Absentia

Here’s the thing: if you made a movie about having to declare someone legally dead because they’d been missing for so long that you have to accept that they won’t come back, but you also have to go through all the emotional trauma that you’ve been holding out against for so long, and so you’re packing up to move, you’re filing this paperwork that makes it real but will also allow you to get out from underneath years of crushing debt, and you have to deal with the trauma of that being a main driver of accepting it, because now you can finally get insurance payouts, but still you don’t even know if he’s dead, and you keep having visions of him, evil-ghostly-pissed as you bridge each milestone on the path to it’s finally over, he is now according to the county-issued certificate of death in Absentia in your hand no longer a living person?

That would already be a horror movie, just all the real and imagined things happening as you process the enormity of what has happened, of what you’ve done.

But what if your sister is hanging out to help you, and she sees a weird dude in a jogging tunnel between your neighborhood and the park (because, overpass) and creepy things start happening, and maybe it turns out that a lot of people have gone missing in this area, and what if sometimes they come back?

I don’t think it quite stuck the landing, but I reckon this movie will stay with me for a while. It goes places that you do not want to go in your life, and not in the “machete at summer camp” kind of way; it goes there in ways you can imagine actually happening, in your worst daydreams.

 

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