Highlights
- Missing is a techno-thriller that explores themes of loss, grief, domestic violence, and strained mother-daughter relationships.
- The film embraces the screenlife format, using video chats, phone calls, text messages, and internet searches to tell the story, effectively keeping the audience guessing.
- While the plot twists can become tiresome and the final act edges towards absurdity, Missing energetically captures the dangers of technology and the spread of conspiracy theories in the age of social media.
Missing is a sequel of sorts to the mystery thriller Searching (2018), in which a father uses all the technology at his disposal to track down his missing daughter. Missing adopts its predecessor’s template, and the entirety of the onscreen action plays out in video chats, phone calls, text messages, old video footage, and any other bits and bobs scattered on the internet. While the screenlife thriller genre may not have the jolt of originality that it once did, first-time directors Will Merrick and Nick Johnson attempt to shake up the formula — mostly successfully.
Missing, like an episode of Black Mirror, is a thriller very much of its time: it confirms suspicions about the increasingly surveilled world of today as well as the social media culture. It is also an exploration of the themes of loss, grief, domestic violence, and strained relations between mothers and daughters. The plot twists do become tedious and the final act teeters on the brink of absurdity, but the movie jostles along energetically, keeping the audience guessing with every new virtual detail.
What Is Missing About?
Director | Will Merrick, Nick Johnson |
|---|---|
Writer | Will Merrick, Nick Johnson |
Cast | Storm Reid, Nia Long, Ken Leung, Joaquim de Almeida, Tim Griffin |
Release Date | January 20, 2023 (United States) |
Runtime | 111 minutes |
Rotten Tomatoes Score | 88% (based on 145 reviews) |
Where to watch |
Missing opens with a home video showing a young June Allen (Ava Zaria Lee) playing with her father James (Tim Griffin), until her mother Grace (Nia Long) points out that the latter’s nose is bleeding. This is followed by an editing of the video, Google searches for brain tumor, and the permanent deactivation of a Google account, with sympathetic voicemails playing in the background. The scene cuts to a prickly 18-year-old June (The Last of Us star Storm Reid) secretly planning a party for when her widowed mother leaves for a romantic getaway with her new boyfriend, Kevin Lin (Ken Leung). Now relocated to Van Nuys, the mother and daughter have become estranged since James’ death. Annoyed that Grace has asked her friend Heather (Amy Landecker) to be her ‘babysitter’, June barely responds to her mother’s all-consuming affection before she leaves. In the following week, Kevin shares a couple of vacation pictures with June, while she parties hard with her friends.
On the day of Kevin and Grace’s return from Colombia, June goes to pick them up from the airport but they never arrive. After contacting the hotel where they stayed, she discovers that they left behind all their luggage. She files a missing person report for Grace, but is warned by Agent Elijah Park (Daniel Henney), of the American consulate, about the possible impact of government red tape. What follows is a number of red herrings and a couple of twists too many, as June frantically taps away at her keyboard and skips between tabs on her cluttered desktop.
She hires a low-rated and inexpensive Go Ninja worker, Javier Ramos (Joaquim de Almeida), to look for clues in Columbia. Unsuccessful in guessing Grace’s password, June manages to access Kevin’s Gmail account, hoping to trace his digital footprint for answers. Instead, she finds out that he has a criminal record of scamming women for their money under different aliases — a fact that Grace already knew, based on their initial conversations on a dating app. This is confirmed by Jimmy, a pastor at a Christian rehabilitation center for ex-convicts, whom Kevin visited a couple of weeks earlier. He believes that Kevin was in love with Grace and was genuinely trying to turn his life around. June is eventually informed by Elijah that footage has been found of Kevin and Grace being kidnapped in Columbia by unidentified criminals.
However, June finds this to be a fabricated event after scouring the internet: not only did Kevin hire a lookalike, amateur artist named Rachel Page to impersonate Grace, but her mother never actually boarded the plane to Columbia. Her kidnapping makes national headlines, shortly after which it is revealed that Grace's real identity is kept hidden due to a court-ordered seal. This leads to widespread speculation about her innocence, and Missing shows the perils of technology when social media is consumed by conspiracy theories and false rumors about the case. As Johnson and Merrick commented in an interview with Mashable:
There was one [high profile] case in particular where it felt like people on TikTok were profiting off of the commentary and theories of this case, that we didn't really love. And so we injected that into the movie itself because we saw that happening [in real life].
Still believing that her only living parent has been kidnapped, June’s cyber-sleuthing leads her to suspect Heather. She sneaks into her office, hoping to record her for evidence, but finds her dead body (and an erased computer) instead. Later, she watches live footage of the Colombian police shooting Kevin — leaving a dead end.
How Does Missing End?
A hopeless June is listening to Grace’s old voicemails, when the password to her mother’s Gmail account dawns on her. Logging in, she sees that someone sent her a threatening email — the same account that Kevin had once interacted with. Apparently, he bought security cameras for an abandoned house, which turns out to be June’s old vacation home in Nevada.
Just then, Jimmy calls June to say that he urgently needs to share some information and arrives at her place. This is when Missing discloses its rather deflating ‘big’ reveal: according to her security cameras, it is June’s father standing on her doorstep. A montage of previous search histories unfolds the mystery: when June was young, James was quite abusive towards Grace (whose real name is Sarah). Knowing that he could not be sent away to prison for long for domestic abuse, Grace turns James in for drug possession. She contacted a lawyer — who turned out to be Heather — to help her change her identity (which is why Heather was blackmailed and ultimately killed). She took June away to create a new life, and protected her by telling her that her father had passed away. During his twelve years in prison, James apparently met Kevin, who helped him orchestrate the entire plan to kidnap Grace on the way to the airport.
James, however, claims that Grace was emotionally unstable and had him arrested under false charges. A distraught June catches him in his lie, and James kidnaps her. He takes her to the abandoned house, where he has also kept Grace. While June is locked up in a room, Grace escapes and finds her. June manages to get through to Javier on her Apple Watch, but when that call is cut off, she uses the audio feed on James’ security camera (the footage of which is still open on her laptop at home) to tell Siri to call 911. James stabs Grace, and then tries to force June to go away with him. A revived Grace attacks him from behind and fatally stabs him with a broken piece of glass.
The scene of his death transitions to a true crime Netflix special made about June’s story. It is now one year later, when June is in college and Grace has recovered from her gunshot wound. They both finalize their plans to meet, and say a heartfelt goodbye.