The real absence...
**Spoilers at the end of the tunnel**
"To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea. Let us sing when we can, and forget the rest." - H.P. Lovecraft
"Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's gonna die. Come watch TV." - Rick & Morty
At a superficial, psychological level, "Absentia" is a very well written and executed no budget film about people gone missing inexplicably -sometimes reappearing for a brief period of time... before vanishing again- and the effect it has on their next of kin: the psychological trauma, the grief, the anxiety of "not knowing", the guilt of eventually letting go and going on with their lives (and though the first couple of jump scares illustrating Callie's guilt are a bit goofy and heavy-handed, the brief, restrained, dialogue-less shot of Daniels' old parents when they learn of their son's second disappearance is as poignant a representation of dignity in grief as any other I've seen).
At a mythological level, "Absentia" is possibly about an antediluvian, tunnel dwelling, insectoid chtonian creature that abducts people and does awful things to them for reasons unfathomable to the human intellect, and who might or might not be at the origin of cross-cultural myths.
But at a deeper, more meaningful, metaphysical level, "Absentia" is really about absence, absence not of a person, but of meaning, of an explanation that would help us cope with the unacceptable nature of our own finiteness, our unavoidable death, and the existential horror that comes with our inability to ascribe any kind of satisfying meaning to it all.
We all live in a nice cozy house next to a haunted tunnel where a foul creature lies, that sometimes leaves it lair to claim our loved ones, and will one day visit us.
And we cannot come to terms with the fact that this hideous beast will eventually lay its cold, slimy, mandibles on us, and that our consciousness will dissolve into nothingness ("Don't underestimate the attraction of oblivion..." says Callie).
And so we stick together around the campfire and tell ourselves stories to try and make sense of it all.
We cling to art (cinema, literature, myth... the stories Callie makes up about her vanished husband, Tricia trying to find meaning in old newspaper articles and mythology), transcendentalism (spirituality, whether secular or religious: Callie and Tricia taking refuge in Christianism and Buddhism), rationalism (science, philosophy... the two detectives searching for "truth" by way of deduction and logic), various substances (Callie's history of substance abuse), etc. to try and find meaning in the unexplainable and unacceptable.
But in the end these are all distractions.
This point is made on three different occasions throughout the film:
- Once, when Tricia asks Callie what she really thinks happened to her husband: Callie imagines several more or less romantic scenarios to try and give meaning to something she cannot explain, and by the same token give some meaning to her years of waiting for his return (or more exactly, waiting for confirmation of his death so she can move on with the man she loves without paying tribute to guilt -something made very clear by the way she treats her husband when he finally returns-).
- A second time, when Tricia tells Callie, who is trying to tie the recent unexplainable events to "the mythology every culture has about creatures that spirit people away and take them into some underworld", that sometimes it is "easier to embrace a nightmare than accept how stupid, how simple reality is".
- And finally, after both Callie and Tricia's disappearance, when detective Mallory builds upon what he knows about both sisters to construct a happy ending for himself (they probably went hand-in-hand to live in nature and grow their own food...).
Like all truly effective and deeply unsettling horror movies (see Kyoshi Kurosawa's Cure and Kairo, Georges Sluizer's Spoorloos...) Absentia works because at it's heart, it about a metaphysical dread that is an inextricable part of existence and consciousness.
To as lesser extent, "Oculus", Mike Flanagan's next film about a haunted mirror (the ultimate symbol of reflective self-delusion) also deals with the same theme. He even reuses the same dialogue about how we delude ourselves by building fictional narratives to keep us from seeing the simple, obvious explanation(or lack thereof).