MISSING ★★★
(M) 111 minutes
A loose follow-up to the 2018 hit Searching, Will Merrick and Nick Johnson’s Missing is billed as a “screen-life” thriller, a genre that has been around for at least a decade under one label or another. Among the first prominent examples was the horror-thriller Unfriended, released in 2014 when the favoured word was “screencast”.
Veena (Megan Suri, left) and June (Storm Reid) attempt to find June’s mum, who has disappeared on holiday, in Missing.
Whatever you call it, it’s an update of the older notion of “found footage”. The conceit is that the story is told solely through text and images that appear on a computer or phone screen within the fiction – though in Missing, it’s not always the same screen we’re looking at, nor do we always see every part of the screen at once.
A true digital native, the teenage heroine June (Storm Reid) is constantly switching between windows and apps. Conveniently, she also has her webcam on most of the time, even when not making video calls – letting us see her mounting distress as she tries to track the whereabouts of her mother Grace (Nia Long), who was last seen in person heading on holiday to Colombia with her new boyfriend Kevin (Ken Leung), who also failed to return home to LA.
June may have some attention-span issues but, thankfully for Grace, she’s a smart cookie. If you were teaching a course on cyberstalking – or, to put it more neutrally, online detective work – you could do worse than show Missing in the first class. The “screen-life” approach lets us follow her strategies in great detail, from hacking email accounts and hunting down clues on social media to using TaskRabbit to recruit a Colombian helper on the ground (Portuguese actor Joaquim de Almeida, a real scene-stealer).
It’s as if she were playing a video game, though one with real-world stakes. The mystery of what really happened to Grace and Kevin is filled with twists that are meant to be fun for the viewer – and for all her mounting fears, it can be hard to believe June isn’t also getting a kick out of testing her investigative skills.
Inevitably, the moment comes when she’s drawn directly into the drama and forced to make a crucial choice. At this point, her anguished uncertainty is mirrored in the murky, low-resolution webcam images – a poetic effect recalling the literal darkness at the climax of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, still the prototype for all thrillers that doubles as reflections on “screen-life”.
All too quickly, order is restored, with less room for lingering ambiguity that Hitchcock allowed. But even then, Merrick and Johnson aren’t entirely out of tricks. Their final, sly joke is a reminder of what’s really missing in Missing: the world outside the screen that no movie can truly show.
Missing is in cinemas from February 23.
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