Film Review - Missing
With the technological boom and rise of the internet in the 2000’s and especially the 2010’s, it was inevitable that the storytelling mediums we use would adapt to match that progress, and no better is this exemplified than with the trend of “screenlife” or “computer screen movies”: a certain subgenre of the “found footage” style of films, which take place entirely or almost-entirely on the computer desktops of the protagonist, showing the characters through their webcams and maintaining a level of mundanity and realism. The subgenre started with the 2002 film A Collingwood Story, but saw a massive surge in the late-2010’s following Blumhouse’s 2014 box office hit Unfriended.
In 2018, director Aneesh Chaganty expanded on this subgenre with his 2018 feature debut Searching, starring John Cho as a father using his computer and social media to track down his missing daughter. Searching added more traditional cinematic techniques to the screenlife film, like an original score, editing techniques like zooming, montages, and cutting between perspectives, to eliminate the tedium of watching the story unfold in real-time, the unfortunate downside of many “found footage” films that came before. Ultimately becoming as tense and effective as any conventional mystery thriller, and then some, through an in-depth look at the way technology connects but also separates even the seemingly-closest of family members.
The long-awaited follow-up Missing builds on Searching’s clever concept by adding more locations, a bigger cast and bigger set-pieces, and most interestingly, more screens. Instead of only showing the story through two or three computer screens all controlled by the main character, we see it from multiple perspective screens, through phones, smart watches, and even a doorbell camera. Missing also flips the POV from an adult learning new corners of the web to find a teenager, to a teenager using ingrained knowledge of social media to find a parent. Through this younger tech-savvy approach, the mystery is able to move along faster without the speedbumps of having to learn about new avenues of the internet, and yet it's not a breeze as we fall into pitfalls due to the recklessness and naivety of the young protagonist. Missing feels very in-tune with modern social media, especially in the ways teenagers use it.
We follow the story of June Allen (Storm Reid), whose mother Grace (Nia Long) doesn’t arrive at the airport after a holiday with her new boyfriend Kevin (Ken Leung), prompting a race against time to find her whereabouts across the world in Columbia. Using the technology at her fingertips, June is able to put pieces together that the police can’t touch, such as logging into her mother’s accounts, finding clues through emails, bank statements, and text messages. June also enlists the help of Taskrabbit user Javier (Joaquim de Almeida) to search Columbia in person. Utilizing different apps and websites than Searching, it follows a similar narrative thread but never gets stale or feels like a simple retreading of the same film, instead its own standalone film that simply uses the same format.
As the feature debut from directors Nicholas D. Johnson and Will Merrick - the editors of Searching, the film goes to town on inventive editing techniques and uses all the comforts of technology that we take for granted, twisting them into complete discomfort for a layer of tension that stays through almost the whole film.
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Missing is screening in cinemas from Thursday 23rd February. For tickets and more info, click here.