Absentia season 1 review: A heartpounding thriller with excellent Stana Katic performance
Is the Amazon series worth your time? Without question, absolutely. It’s one of the most addictive series of the year, it features some great performances, and it certainly also raises questions (especially in the final episode) about guilt, control, and the last effects of psychological trauma.
It also features consistently the strongest performance of Stana Katic’s career as she plays Emily Byrne, a woman desperate to clear her name, with power and pain. She resurfaces in Boston after six years missing, and you would hope that there would be a groundswell of sympathy for what she went through. However, that is not exactly the case. Instead, she just finds herself accused of murder and the charges only escalate as the show progresses. She tries to maintain her old life, including relationships with her former husband Nick and her son Flynn, but soon after that figures out just how impossible it is.
Absentia is a show that builds and builds as it goes along, and every step of the way it poses questions about Emily’s potential guilt as well as why someone would ever want to traumatize another human being by repeatedly locking them in a tank. There’s psychological warfare at play here — we’ve seen many a story over the years about supervillains trying to find a way to manipulate and control the behavior of others, but never explicitly in this sort of way.
The plausibility debate
Can you make the argument that there are questionable decisions that some of the characters, including Emily, make as the series jumps from one event to the next? Sure, and we’ve seen many of our colleagues in the critical community question some of them. Yet, in the process they seem to all be operating under the assumption that these characters would always make rational, smart decisions in the midst of being traumatized. Take, for example, Nick’s wife Alice looking outside after she hears noises, or Nick repeatedly putting himself in harm’s way when he could have just called for backup. While Nick and Emily in particular may be FBI agents, they’re also acting based on emotion and trying to protect those close to them in the moment. They’re more invested in resolving the murders than anyone else, even though for most of the series they have differing suspects. (The entire second half, by and large, Nick is going after Emily.)
To a certain extent, you do have to suspend belief with a series like this much in the way you would any other, and that is not a bad thing. The important thing is that you commit yourself to the ride and play along with the mystery.
Are there things that could be improved?
The biggest flaw in Absentia season 1 is mostly just its length. Several episodes could be stretched another five or ten minutes and it would’ve been useful to learn more about some characters like Alice and Tommy. We spend such a limited time in this world that there needs to be opportunities to flesh out some of these characters more. (Performance-wise, we will say that Cara Theobold was one of the most pleasant surprises; we didn’t know too much about her going into the series and she totally delivers in the later episodes as Alice.)
CarterMatt Verdict
As a whole, though, Absentia delivers on the strength of Katic’s harrowing performance and also getting a chance to see some edge-of-your-seat entertainment. It invests you within its story and once you watch one or two episodes, you’re going to find it very difficult to stop watching until you reach the end.
Related – Check out all of our individual Absentia episode reviews
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