Just prior to the advanced screening of Missing, two theater employees loudly discussed the film’s title. “They’re so similar!” One exclaimed, “first there’s Searching, then Missing, what’s the third one going to be called? Locating?” To be fair, there’s an undeniably arbitrary quality to the film’s name. The two films could easily be confused, swapped even, but are they the same? Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching is a clever and economical thriller that capitalized on the (then) burgeoning trend of movies set entirely on a computer (think Unfriended or Host) yet presented its mystery in a more grounded way. By contrast, Missing is simply a thriller. The protagonist is younger, the tone and twists more extreme, and the pacing has been dialed up to eleven. It’s Searching for the TikTok generation.
The protagonist is June Allen (Storm Reid), an 18-year-old girl living with her single mom, Grace (Nia Long) in suburban Los Angeles after the death of her father, James, from what we presume is a brain aneurysm. Though their relationship is close, Grace’s overprotectiveness of June has distanced the two. When Grace goes on vacation in Colombia with her new boyfriend, Kevin (Ken Leung), June is tasked with picking them up from the airport, but they never come back. June begins a vigorous online investigation, and soon, twists begin piling up like excessive tabs on a multitasker’s browser.
Directors Nicholas D. Johnson and Will Merrick, adapting a story by Chaganty and Sev Ohanian, do a good job at keeping the mystery brisk and entertaining. Clues are uncovered at a rapid rate, and importantly, there’s a sense that Johnson and Merrick actually understand how the internet works. Throughout the film, June makes clever use of real-life websites to achieve her goals, and the dialogue between the characters, as well as on social media and news websites, feels plausible and “locked-in” with the current media landscape. The most ingenious recurring gag involves Netflix true crime shows and is honestly a bit too good to spoil. Missing’s efficient use of its online setting assures that the story never wears thin, with a steady array of shocks and increasingly absurd, yet genuinely clever twists engineered precisely to be enjoyed by an enthusiastic crowd. It’s hard not to have a good time, even as the story begins to stretch the boundaries of plausibility by miles.
But the breakneck pacing is also where Missing falters. It’s excessively edited to the point of exhaustion, with so much zooming in, out and sideways that there’s barely ever a chance to look around. Part of the appeal of setting a movie on a computer is that you can search the screen for details (one of Searching’s best easter eggs is its continuous news reports of an alien invasion). Missing’s inability to stay still prevents those types of discoveries, occasionally creating the sensation of watching a feature length trailer.
Julian Scherle’s musical score is also an issue. Loud and dramatic, it papers over everything like a thick, unremovable blanket. The most egregious musical moment comes when, during the reveal of one of Missing’s biggest twists, the score inexplicably copies, note-for-note, the main theme from Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. It’s common practice for editors to use temp music when putting together a rough cut of their film, but it seems like Scherle followed those tracks a bit too closely. The most tense and effective moments of Missing are when it quiets down, allowing us to observe its open spaces in eerie, computerized silence. Unfortunately, by the rather ridiculous third act, that tension almost completely disappears.
Missing’s saving grace is that the medium it occupies is still relatively new, and thus the tricks it employs can be unexpected. The film has novel ways of getting around certain logistical issues, such as how a teenager in LA could investigate a disappearance all the way in South America. One such workaround sees June using a TaskRabbit-esque site to befriend a local Colombian man named Javier (Joaquim de Almeida), whom she hires remotely to run investigatory errands. This provides a reasonably compelling exploration of how a missing person investigation could occur in the modern age. The internet has in many ways enabled unprecedented connections between a wide variety of people from various backgrounds and experiences, which is an exciting, and somewhat modern prospect for a mystery of this type.
Ultimately, you could do a lot worse than Missing. It’s neither as intelligent nor as thrilling as its predecessor but has a brazen and dastardly charm all of its own. Importantly, it utilizes its format effectively enough to feel distinct, even if some of its mechanics feel slightly too convenient at times. In a month known for its dearth of quality cinematic content, it’s refreshing to see a possible franchise built upon such an open concept, where repetition is less of a risk because the base concept has so much potential for experimentation. It’s a brave new world out there. They should probably work on those titles, though.
Photo courtesy of Screen Gems
The post Missing appeared first on Spectrum Culture.