In the early stages Absent, a teenager named June (played by Storm Reed) receives a FaceTime call from her mother, Grace (Nia Long). Grace is about to let June go home alone for a few days and wants her daughter to write down reminders. But instead of transcribing her mother’s advice, June taps the keys to give the impression that she’s taking notes diligently, eventually spelling out her annoyance:
All of this plays out on June’s monitor, and the camera flies around her cluttered desktop, tracking every move of her cursor. Absenthits theaters this week, Computers, mobile phones, smart watches, security cameras, everything is set on the screen. As a filmmaking tool, the gimmick works best when the story involves a large amount of online action, like googling him for characters, sending messages, watching videos, and more. As a result, most films in this vein tend to be mysteries that are revealed via digital clues.The best of these 2018’s Searchingfollows a father who is investigating the social media archives of his missing daughter.
Absent is from the same creative team and operates as an independent sequel. When Grace disappears while traveling abroad, June begins an investigation on the Internet. She scours her stream live in the area where Grace has gone. She scans Grace’s boyfriend’s Facebook page. She guesses the password to unlock Grace’s chat history on the dating app. Along the way, she discovers how little she knew about her mother, and the thrill of watching her films comes from keeping up with her twists.
Like Searchingthe film examines how our online selves differ from our real-world identities, and how technology can create distance between parents and children. SearchingBut the digital format feels so much less justified: Grace’s disappearance is much more in the scope of a global manhunt involving the FBI and leading to several deaths. Continuing to use a laptop on a seems a bit perplexing, if not misplaced.
The result is a movie that is well-crafted but buggy in its execution, as if the software update was premature. While following the viewpoint of young Generation Z users, Absent Rarely do we try to imagine what an 18-year-old screen might reveal beyond watching TikTok videos, uploading Instagram stories, and snoozing alarms. The plot desperately tries to keep the screen-only stunt going, but it unintentionally leads to an interesting twist. At one point, a friend of June’s who lost her smartwatch at her home texted her an image of her ad. Just like her teens today don’t know what a smartwatch looks like, she knows what to look for. At times, the film comes close to observing the insidiousness of online detectives and true criminal culture, a montage play in which TikTokers discuss “evidence” about Grace’s case, and June in a scene from the Netflix series. Look at the, Searching— but moments like that are played for laughter.
Still, the tech-focused perspective is effective at conveying the emotional state of the characters. Cover up. When she is granted access to her mother’s dating app profile, her mouse fumbles for a while before checking her chat history. Even her smallest choices, like June wondering which emoji to use to respond to her messages, feel very important.
In that regard, however, Absent Opportunity loss. The film is visually original, with the addition of flashback scenes of him and other characters screens that take place on the 2008 desktop. That means it’s versatile enough to do more than tell the story of your investigation. As I’m typing this review, I wondered what would have happened if the Internet had been temporarily cut off and June hadn’t been able to access so many sources in various ways. We have explored the horrors that come with the infinite size of , many times, but have not explored the pitfalls of hyper-connectivity. There’s something terrifying about how much of June’s life has been documented, and how much has already been documented.If Absent It may be time to reboot the whole system.
