Aneesh Chaganty’s 2018 film Searching is effective for the way that its screen-based language of storytelling feels like an organic extension of its protagonist’s antic search to uncover the truth about his missing teenage daughter via digital sleuthing. Directors Nick Johnson and Will Merrick, who edited the earlier film, employ a similar conceit with Missing, as it also plays out entirely on computer and cellphone screens. In the film, 18-year-old June (Storm Reid) must use her laptop to track down her mother, Grace (Nia Long), after she goes missing during a vacation to Colombia with her boyfriend, Kevin (Ken Leung).
But where Searching is self-contained, Missing doesn’t just stick to the perspective supplied by one character’s phone and computer. As June’s sleuthing intensifies, the film begins to cut between various people’s electronic devices, even showing another character’s computer activity from years earlier via flashback to convey information that June has no access to.
The real-time flow of new information is instrumental to what makes Searching and other “screen-life” films so smart and suspenseful, and for a while, the same can be said of Missing. But as its central mystery grows increasingly outlandish and convoluted, the film loses any and all reason to play out solely on an array of screens, and the approach becomes more of a gimmick than an essential (or even relevant) means of telling its story.
The filmmakers certainly have a knack for capturing the differences in the ways that Gen Xers and Gen Zers interact with technology, as evinced by one amusing scene involving a password and a recurring Siri joke that pays off in spades in Missing’s otherwise dire third act. But the script’s steady succession of red herrings is more tiresome than terrifying, and in the process the film veers away from its predecessor’s raison d’etre of exploring the ways in which technology can both obscure and reveal truths about those we think we know best.
Missing, then, is in the business of pulling the rug out from under its audience, and it often settles for doing so in a distinctly soapy fashion, as in one scene that abruptly reintroduces us to a character that we thought was long gone. This is a film that tries to capitalize on the immediacy of the screen-based thriller but ultimately looks silly in trying to do so. Humor for the sake of humor is a worthwhile pursuit, but Missing’s final act is more unintentionally funny than intentionally funny, though by that point the script’s barrage of twists and turns will have likely left most in the audience too tired to even muster a laugh.
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