In short: Missing (2023)

June (Storm Reid) isn’t too happy her mother Grace (Nia Long) is going on a romantic trip to Colombia with her new boyfriend Kevin (Ken Leung). Particularly not around Father’s Day, when June is especially vulnerable to the grief from the loss of her Dad (Tim Griffin) some years ago.

Things become rather more intense when Grace and Kevin don’t return from Colombia. They seem to have disappeared without a trace, and the official side is very slow to react. June, clearly not one to lose another parent, uses the various spying, snooping and investigative tools the Internet provides her to find her mother.

Nicholas D. Johnson’s and Will Merrick’s Missing is a curious film. On an emotional level and in its character work, it is as hackneyed as a movie can get. All of its emotions seem to come to it second hand, taken from other movies and scriptwriting handbooks instead of anything that feels genuinely human. Worse, the writer/directors use the tropes and clichés so obviously and inelegantly, they simply never evoke the emotional reactions they are so desperately grabbing for.

On a plot level, this is the usual concoction of increasingly absurd and improbable twists. The thing is, and there lies the film’s great strength, Missing’s presentation of its flat emotional content and its by-the-numbers twists is pretty spectacular. This is one of those movies where everything we see happens on a laptop screen, but I have never seen one that seems to get the possibilities of this format for a thriller so right. All of the creativity and energy the rest of the film misses seems to have been put into its formal approach; where the plot twists never really work, the formal twists with which they are presented are often clever, original and new. In fact, these qualities are so large, they often overshadow the manifold flaws of the film.

Of course, pairing this with a deeper and more intelligent story and characters would have resulted in quite the film, but even so, Missing is a lot more effective than you’d expect, despite of itself.