Missing Review: Katayama Shinzô’s Cat-and-Mouse Mystery Keeps You Guessing, to a Fault

One night, Satoshi (Satô Jirô) tells his preteen daughter, Kaede (Aoi Itô), that he recognized a man (Shimizu Hiroya) on the train whose face is on wanted posters around Osaka, labeling him a serial killer and promising a hefty reward for information leading to his capture. When Kaede awakens the next morning, Satoshi is gone without a trace.

On its own, Satoshi’s disappearance would be concerning enough, but a handful of earlier scenes in Missing make us question the man’s ability to care for himself. Since the death of Satoshi’s wife, the depths of depression have left him sullen and aloof. When we first see him, he’s been detained at a convenience store over a tiny sum that Kaede shows up to pay. All the while he sits at a table, the pout on Satô’s wide face enhancing the character’s childish qualities.

In her exasperation, Kaede gives off the air of a kid who had to grow up too quickly. The best parts of Katayama Shinzô’s film traces her desperate search for her father with wry humor, as she navigates bureaucratic obstacles and transactional relationships. Throughout, Katayama scores great comedic mileage by showing that beyond-her-years maturity crack, revealing an adrift child who will spit at people or stomp on missing posters in frustration.

A recurring image of Kaede sprinting through Osaka’s streets and alleys in a wide shot is at once poignant and comical for amplifying the effect of such a short girl moving with such purposefulness. Elsewhere, by capturing the reactions of bystanders and lingering on the clutter of various characters’ apartments, Katayama and cinematographer Ikeda Naoya excel at giving us a sense of a larger world that makes the characters’ turmoils seem so small by comparison.

Missing, then, excels as a study in contrast, though it loses that focus as it proceeds. Through changing perspectives in nested flashbacks, we follow the killer and his tiresome, one-sided dialogue about human suffering. We learn things about Satoshi that less deepen his character and his relationships than make his initial depiction feel like a cheat. By the time we finally return to Kaede, Missing hasn’t exactly lost the plot, but it has certainly lost the characters while tying itself into so many knots chasing the superficial sugar high of a big reveal.