The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C+
Missing harkens back to a (thankfully) short-lived trend from 2014-2018. The thought process at the time was simple: If members of Gen Z find it so difficult to look away from their phones for two hours, let’s make movies that simulate the riveting experience of staring at a phone. So, instead of a movie filmed like, well, a movie, there was a brief period of experimentation told entirely through a computer screen with the characters interacting through texting, messaging and web cams. It was about as riveting as it sounds, resulting in such classics as Unfriended, Unfriended: Dark Web and, the predecessor to this movie, Searching. Considering that those films were all varying degrees of awful and the idea of watching teenagers living their lives online is about as appealing as getting a vasectomy with rusty hedge clippers, I didn’t exactly have high hopes for Missing. Fortunately, this movie is surprisingly on the positive side of decent. Perhaps not the highest possible praise, but actually a hell of a nice surprise.
Our lead is teenaged June (played by Storm Reid, whose parents are, I assume, massive Fantastic Four fans), who throws a house party when her mother, Grace, goes on vacation in Mexico with her boyfriend, Kevin. When June goes to pick them up at the airport a few days later, they are nowhere to be found. After discovering that the police can’t help her, June performs her own internet-based investigation, using social media, search histories and online cam footage to piece together what happened to her mother.
While this is officially a sequel to Searching, it isn’t a continuation of the plot of that film and is primarily a sequel in the sense that it is a mystery/thriller told in the same style. The films aren’t entirely unconnected, as they take place in the same universe and the events of Searching are referenced several times, but it isn’t necessary to watch Searching in order to understand Missing, which is good because I barely remember Searching beyond the fact that I didn’t care much for it. Missing surpasses its predecessor, as best as I can remember it, because of the quality of the lead performance and a central mystery that, while still ridiculous, is better suited for this kind of presentation.
I could feel a migraine coming on during the opening scenes of Missing, as the realization that a teenaged girl is our main character filled me with existential dread about the two hours that laid before me. That’s not to say that Storm Reid’s performance didn’t seem genuine; the problem is quite the opposite. June very much felt like a modern girl of her age, as her hobbies include sulking, staring at her phone and sulking while staring at her phone. However, she does start to turn into a real person once her mother appears and, to the film’s great credit, I was legitimately rooting for this girl by the time the end credits rolled. As a lead character, she’s smart, resourceful and surprisingly sympathetic. Okay, she’s unable to figure out a password that’s obvious a half hour into the movie, but other than that, she’s a solid lead for a mystery film.
The mystery itself is better suited for the format than Searching’s mystery, as the fact that the mom went missing in Mexico lends itself to online sleuthing rather than old fashioned clue-finding. The use of online resources is also more clever here, as the integration of online cameras and online services that I’ve never heard of are used quite effectively (seriously, is there an online service where you can hire people to just do odd jobs for you? I’m not doubting that it exists, I’ve just never heard of it). The use of cameras is also done wisely, sometimes creating more traditional and effective camera angles while allowing the movie to stick to its format. On the downside, and also like Searching, the mystery goes a couple of twists too far. The plot feels resolved a couple of times before the final resolution, as if the writers were being paid by the number of “gotcha!” moments that they could cram into the last half hour.
As a 38 year-old man that despises social media and doesn’t give a shit about true crime, I’m probably not the target audience for this movie. I did see it with a nearly-packed house and the audience loved it; they jumped, screamed and cheered at all the right times. I still hate this format and it severely limits the dramatic possibilities of the format, but I can’t be too hard on it. I’ve seen Unfriended, so I know how insufferable this kind of movie can be and, on that scale, Missing isn’t half bad.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_(2023_film)#/media/File:Missing_poster.jpg
