ABSENTIA
AMAZON PRIME VIDEO OUT 2 FEBRUARY EPISODES VIEWED 1-4
DIRECTORS Gaia Violo, Matt Cirulnick CAST Stana Katic, Patrick Heusinger, Cara Theobold, Richard Brake, Ralph Ineson
PLOT FBI agent Emily Byrne (Katic) was declared dead after going missing on the hunt for a killer. Six years later, she is found. Her husband (Heusinger) has a new wife, her son has forgotten her and she has no idea who took her. With a new spate of deaths, Emily finds herself under suspicion.
THERE ARE TWO schools of TV drama now, in an age when broadcast TV and streaming services are on about equal footing. There is the slow-burn series, more common on paid-for platforms that don’t need to worry about advertising money, which tends to focus on dissecting character more that ploughing through plot. Then there is the more traditional propulsive drama, which works hard to grab you from scene one and ends every episode on a cliffhanger to keep you (and the advertisers) coming back. Shows designed not to be binged but watched with weekly gaps. Absentia is very much the latter, but it may have been better as the former.
It’s a great sell: Emily (Katic), an FBI agent is lost while tracking a serial killer and given up for dead. Six years on, she’s found in a shack in the woods, scarred, terrified and with no memory of what happened to her. Her husband, Nick (Heusinger), also an FBI agent and now remarried, is torn between joy at her return and terror of what this means for his new family. To cap it all, new people are dying and Emily is acting very oddly, putting her whole disappearance under suspicion.
There’s a whole lot of juice in that concept, but in the first four episodes not much of it is squeezed. Dramatically, there’s so much to be done with the triangle of Emily, Nick and Nick’s new wife, Alice (Theobold). What do six years of horror do to a person’s emotions? Can you love two people at once? Is the return of a person already mourned a gift or a curse? Emily’s arrival should be like a bomb going off, yet the show’s treatment of her reappearance is brisk and overly polite. Alice is begrudgingly understanding, Emily’s son starts treating her as a loved one almost immediately, and everyone tries to make the best of things without fighting. The whole feeling is of a mother reappearing after ditching her kid for a few years, not escaping a murdering lunatic to find her whole world has moved on from her.
The show’s focus is much more on the whodunnit aspect, which is lurid and fun, if frequently silly. That Emily immediately goes back to investigating is bonkers. That she does so while repeatedly breaking the law — beating up suspects, breaking and entering — in an effort to prove she’s innocent is dafter still. In just the first four episodes there are enough eye-rolling twists that faith in a satisfying, logical resolution ebbs away. If it were a bit less keen to pull the rug as many times as possible this could settle in to a great show. These are certainly characters that offer up a ton of story potential, but they’re so far wading through a plot that’s all pulp. OLLY RICHARDS
VERDICT It’s the TV equivalent of an airport novel, just enticing enough to maintain interest in what happens next, but if you put it down for a minute you’re unlikely to be tempted back.