‘MISSING’ Effectively Uses In-Screen Gimmick for Taut Family Thriller

All good mysteries are constructed like mazes. There’s sudden left turns, dead ends, and only one real way out. The astute viewer ought to be able to follow the clues and connect the dots, usually to at least a few inevitable red herrings before arriving at the real whodunnit. With 2018’s Searching and sequel Missing, the young combo of Nicholas D. Johnson, Will Merrick, and Aneesh Chaganty have perfected a pretty neat new way to create movie mazes.

The backdoor to unlocking this new breed of maze is a gimmick, but an effective gimmick nonetheless: the movie exists entirely in virtual spaces. On FaceTime, Instagram stories, Ring cameras, security footage, car backup cams, Gmail, and more, we see characters through their screens and their digital interactions with themselves and others. We get a window into someone’s thoughts in a way that movies really haven’t been able to before. We’re witness to the written but not sent thoughts; unspoken truths.

The viewer is positioned as a voyeur of sorts, allowed to observe behind the curtain. While this could ostensibly be limiting narratively, Missing uses this tool to penetrate the psyche of its characters. Their past and present lives are crystallized online ad infinitum; digital moments frozen like jurassic mosquitos in amber. Open to revisit like a never-cleared search history.

This is by no means a new gimmick – nor is it would that I can stomach more than a few times each year, and only when done well – but the Missing team have largely perfected the formula. This sequel focuses on June (Storm Reid), a high school student who plots to throw a series of house parties when her mom Grace (Nia Long) and new boyfriend Kevin (Ken Leung) depart for a week-long vacation in Colombia. Seven days and many a rager later, Grace doesn’t show up in arrivals at LAX. Both her and Kevin’s phones are off. The hotel where they were staying claim they left all their belongings behind. The mysteries keep piling up. June soon realizes that something is horribly wrong. And then the news catches wind of the story.

The prying eyes of the world quickly turns Grace’s disappearance into a media circus leaving June to play sleuth. With the help of local Colombian “task rabbit” Javi (Joaquim de Almeida) and CIA Agent Park (Daniel Henney), June tracks her mom’s digital footprint across the city of Cartagena using payment receipts, live tourist cams, Google maps tracking, dating apps, and pretty much any other app on your phone that you can imagine, hoping to figure out what happened to her before it’s too late.

Improving upon Searching’s relative visual stasis, Missing finds a variety of ways to explore the digital space, leveraging new techniques and tricks to give the filmmaking a bit more flair and variety. Directors Johnson and Merrick keep things clipping along, shifting between different lens but always with a focus on character. Strong performances from the likes of Reid, Long, and Leung, help center the twisting, turning mystery in a strong emotional core. Things spiral, they dead end, they left turn, but it all arrives at an earned conclusion that hints at deep meaning.

CONCLUSION: ‘Missing’ is a technically sharp, twisty mystery anchored by strong performances. The in-screen gimmick (used before in ‘Searching’) may get varying mileage from viewers but credit to directors Nicholas D. Johnson and Will Merrick for finding ways to switch things up more this go around. A satisfying movie maze with a modern tilt.