July 4, 2023
June Allen (Storm Reid) lost her father James (Tim Griffin) to a brain tumor when she was 6 years old. Since then, she was raised by her mother Grace (Nia Long) as a single parent. Her mother would ask her lawyer friend Heather (Amy Landecker) to babysit June if necessary. When June became a teenager, her relationship with her mother became strained because Grace always wanting to know where she was at all times.
Recently, Grace met a man named Kevin (Ken Leung) on an online dating app and they hit it off quite well in the next few months. One day, Grace and Kevin went off to a weekend vacation to Cartagena, Colombia, leaving June behind to watch the house. When June went to the airport to pick Grace and Kevin up at the Los Angeles Airport, they never showed up. Panicked, June went online on various apps and websites to look for them.
"Missing" is another example of a recently-developed visual technique in films called "screenlife," which told its story using only images displayed on monitors of a desktop computer, laptop or mobile phone. This term was first coined by Russian-Kazakh director Timur Bekmambetov in 2015 to describe his film "Unfriended," a horror film about a dead girl getting even with her bullies told via screencasts from a MacBook.
In 2018, Bekmambetov produced a film directed by Annesh Chaganty, entitled "Searching," a thriller about a distraught father looking for his missing daughter, also told only using computer and phone monitors. Even if the characters and plot are not similar, "Missing," which is written and directed by Will Merrick and Will Johnson, is a sequel of sorts to "Searching," the second film in a planned screenlife anthology. Chaganty was one of the producers.
Like "Searching," the basic story also a took lot of twists and turns as June went hacking through email accounts, social media sites, security sites owned by both Grace and Kevin, against the advice of Heather and FBI agent Park (Daniel Henney). Using an app, she was able to hire Javier (Joaquim de Almeida), a courier in Cartagena, to do various errands for her. Everytime she thought she had a breakthrough, something else happens to stymie her again.
The start did not grab me right away, especially with June's teenager angst. When the main story of Grace's disappearance began to unravel, you get hooked in with June's tech skills coming into play, even if I did not exactly understand how she's doing it. However, the plot twists do became too farfetched as the violence goes over the top. Then, that final twist just so shocking, too good -- until the plot holes reveal themselves afterwards. 7/10.
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