Drown Your Sorrows.
This is a spoiler-free review for the first four episodes of Amazon's Absentia, which is a 10-episode series.
Normally, for us here at IGN, when a new original series debuts on a streaming platform, like an Amazon or a Netflix, we'll consume the entire season before offering up a review. Of course, when entire seasons are not made available to the press ahead of time, that means we'd then watch the remaining episodes on the Friday the show premieres and post the review either that day or Saturday.
Giving something new a whirl, I'm just going to write about what I've been allowed to see ahead of time in order to present you with an advance review. I haven't seen the end. Hell, I haven't seen half the season (only four of the 10), but I've watched enough to offer you a preliminary score.
Featuring Castle's Stana Katic in her return to TV, Absentia is, for all intents and purposes, a bit of a misery pile-on. Now those who know me know that I love a good sullen and depressing romp through Nightmare-land, but I also enjoy balance. Absentia is so aggressively bleak at times that it feels like a sub-category of torture porn - just off to the side, where it's the writer, off-screen and off-page, putting the heroine through an elaborate, convoluted emotional and physical wringer.
Absentia reminds me, somewhat, of the slew of Seven copycats that came out in the wake of that seminally dark film that also missed the point of Seven by presenting empty anguish and suffering. Neil Jordan's oddball In Dreams (starring Annette Bening and Robert Downey Jr.) springs to mind in the sense that we're given a female lead whose life is torn apart and destroyed...only for things to then get exponentially worse for her.
Again, I've only seen, basically, the set up here. The payoff for all of this could be huge. In fact, it'd better be huge because Absentia has a ton of explaining to do. Katic plays FBI Agent Emily Byrne, a woman who once had a happy life (we can assume based on very brief glimpses of a home movie) but then went missing while chasing an elusive madman called the Eyelids Killer (he cuts eyelids off - der). The wealthy weirdo she was tailing (Batman Begins' Richard Brake) goes to jail for her presumed murder, but - of course - she's not dead.
For six years Emily's held captive and subjected to terror and torture. Then, whoever the Jigsaw-style plotter and sadist is who had her locked up drops her back into reality with no memory of her time away. Now she's lost her family - as her FBI Agent husband has remarried and her young son no longer remembers her - and she's dealing with a lion's load of trauma and psychological damage. And the hits just keep coming for poor Emily. While she's recovering, and taking the smallest steps to re-assimilate, bodies start dropping and she's framed for their deaths.
Because we hit the ground running here with Emily's torture and turmoil, we never get to know who she was before any of this. Likewise, we don't get to know any of the characters before Emily gets abducted. We only see who they all are six years on. We only ever know Emily in a state of panic and dread. There's no "off" button here for her suffering. It can get exhausting.
Now, I will say that, in the fourth episode, "Me You Him Me," Emily starts to become proactive and the series picks up from an answers standpoint, but this is still a very large amount of angst to absorb. Katic does a great job here as, essentially, a shattered person who can't get a leg up in her life because someone is going to ridiculously complicated lengths to puppet her slow destruction. I'm talking absurdly intricate things like being right there in the shadows (so no one else can see anything identifiable) to kill someone Emily was just talking to a minute earlier. Not only is that bonkers to the point where I'm not sure I'll readily buy whatever big reveal is that's coming at the end of the story, but it's also one of those moments that only exists for the sake of viewers. Like, it's a twist that only can happen on a TV show where the story only exists through the prism of camera angles and editing.
The poster art for Absentia depicts Emily underwater, drowning. It's tied to a serpentine Saw-type trap depicted on the show, yes, but it also represents what both Emily and the viewer feel while enduring this crucible. This sense of slow strangulation. Again, Katic's performance is powerful and you can feel the crushing weight Emily holds in her heart, but - at least in these first four chapters - there's no let up. There are sparse moments of serenity here and there, as Emily tries to rejoin the lives of her son and husband, but they don't last (in once instance it really comes crashing down, almost comically in fact). Joy has no place in this journey.
Absentia, at its heart, is a red herring parade. From the get-go you'll be trying to figure out who in Emily's life is out to violate and ruin her. Her old boss? Her on-the-wagon brother? Her husband's new wife (guess how quickly she becomes awful)? Her shrink (who's suspiciously not a fleshed out character). Or worst of all...has Emily's been brainwashed to be some sort of Manchurian Candidate copycat killer? Regardless, whatever predictions you might have almost don't feel like they'll be sufficient enough of an explanation for the hateful hell Emily's being put through.
On top of all this, Absentia feels even more detached, more untethered, from reality due to it being a sort of an international hodgepodge of creators and actors. It's based in Boston, though most of the cast are from the U.K., growling their way through an American accent. Everyone is serviceable - from ex-hubby Patrick Heusinger to new wife Cara Theobold to shifty FBI boss Ralph Ineson - but they have to juggle a lot of circular dialogue (it takes five sentences to get to the point, people don't directly respond to what the other person just said, etc).
Perhaps Absentia would have made for a better movie, or some sort of story told in shorter form than a 10-episode trek through darkness. You feel awful enough for Emily after the first 20 minutes of the first episode that I can't imagine watching her twist in a hurricane for ten hours will lead to something worthwhile. We'll see.
The Verdict
Stan Katic's performance shines here, as a trauma victim whose life just keeps getting convolutedly worse, but otherwise Absentia - for the first four episodes - is a misery parade with no hope of reprieve. The mystery plot, in which Emily a pawn of pain, is so sprawling that the design of the show seems to be our heroes being wrong over and over again until the final endgame reveal.
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