D/S: Mike Flanagan. P: Justin Gordon, Morgan Peter Brown, Mike Flanagan. Cast: Katie Parker, Courtney Bell, Dave Levine, Justin Gordon, Morgan Peter Brown. UK dist (DVD): Second Sight.

Seven years after the mysterious disappearance of her husband Daniel, Tricia (Courtney Bell) is persuaded finally to have him declared “dead in absentia”. Her messed-up younger sister Callie (Katie Parker), in and out of rehab for a drug habit she claims to have kicked (with help from Jesus), comes to stay with Tricia to help her through the process. Soon, however, Callie finds herself drawn to a nearby underpass which, she later discovers, has been linked with other disappearances over the years. And when Daniel (Morgan Peter Brown) suddenly turns up alive – near-catatonic, covered in blood and bruises – Callie begins to suspect there may be something living in the tunnel… something indescribably horrible, which preys on human fear and suffering. And now it’s after her and Tricia…

A minor gem. As Absentia’s plot uncoils, a creeping, crawling, pernicious menace slowly works its way under the viewer’s skin. The leisurely pace allows for a deeper-than-usual focus on performance and characterisation, ensuring that our sympathies with the sisters are well and truly entrenched by the time the real nastiness kicks in. The slow build-up works a treat, the horror content restricted at the outset to a number of chilling hallucinations of the “dead” Daniel from Tricia’s viewpoint (his grey face, silently screaming, suddenly looming from the bedroom wardrobe, for instance). We’re so used to seeing these apparitions of Daniel that it comes as a genuine shock when the last one turns out to be real. This manipulation of perceptions is genuinely unsettling.

As with the Irish-made ghost story The Eclipse (2009), you’d be forgiven for forgetting Absentia was a horror film at all for much of its running time. At its core, it’s a melancholy study of loss and its aftermath, suffused with a profound gloom that would be unbearable if not for the expertly-timed introduction of its supernatural element. And my god, any doubts as to genre vanish pretty damn fast after that. There’s still plenty of room for ambiguity, however – through subtle use of speculative “flashbacks”, writer-director Mike Flanagan (Oculus) cleverly suggests a rationalist alternative to the chilling goings-on. Through a handful of flash-cuts here and there, we see how things might have played out differently – though by the end (particularly the very last shot), these seem increasingly like wishful thinking. Highly recommended.