166 - Absentia

    Seven years earlier, a man goes missing.  His wife is now able to declare him dead in absentia.  Creepy stuff happens.
    That summary avoids anything that could be considered a spoiler.
    This movie is a mixed bag.  There are a lot of cliche sequences, especially closer to the start of the story.  There are loads of “the spooky ghost shows up unexpected and threatens someone” moments.  I’m very tired of seeing those.  They can be done well, but it seems to get harder to do that.  But there are a few things that I liked about this.  First, the story plays with a few perspectives.  We see the supernatural version of the story, but we occasionally get a few scenes of people speculating about alternate sequences.  This is done early on, when the wife talks about ideas she had for what happened to her husband.  These flights of fancy have an interesting effect of making the whole story seem less like a definitive picture is being painted.
    This idea continues at the end, when the police are speculating about what a reasonable accounting for their story would be.  It’s one thing if we see characters talk about these ideas.  It’s another to show them to the audience.  When the audience sees them, they become a credible idea.
    The second thing that the movie does well is that it explores an idea of mythology that I don’t see represented in horror movies often.  The story is loosely tied together with the Billy Goat’s Gruff.  The antagonist is only glimpsed, and what it does is never clearly stated.  There is an implied mythology, but not an explicit one.
    Until I wrote that sentence, I hadn’t considered it, but this could easily have been condensed into an episode of The X-Files.