The screen-bound follow-up to Searching is quick, clever and, for an hour, properly tense. Then the twists arrive in a queue, and a story that ran on plausibility starts spending it. Storm Reid holds it together longer than the script deserves.
Will Merrick and Nicholas D. Johnson have made a thriller that takes place entirely on screens: a laptop, a phone, a doorbell camera, a hotel’s security feed. It is a stand-alone follow-up to Searching (2018), with a story by that film’s director, Aneesh Chaganty, and his producing partner Sev Ohanian. This time the searcher is a daughter. June (Storm Reid) waves her mother Grace (Nia Long) and Grace’s boyfriend Kevin (Ken Leung) off to Colombia for a week, spends the week as you would expect, and turns up at the airport to collect them. Nobody comes through the gate.
For an hour Missing is a quick, clever, properly tense little film, and then it starts adding twists and does not know when to stop. That is the whole of our complaint, and it is a real one, because the film runs on plausibility and spends most of it in the last forty minutes.
The format is the film, so the craft is where the credit goes. Steven Holleran is the cinematographer of a film with no camera in the usual sense; every image is something a device saw, and he has to make a FaceTime freeze or a grainy doorbell feed do the work a close-up would. Arielle Zakowski and Austin Keeling, the editors, have the harder job and do it well. Suspense here is a cursor hovering over a button, a password typed wrong twice, a text written and deleted, and they time those small movements like gags. Kelly Fallon’s production design is mostly June’s desktop, which is a mess, as it should be.
Reid carries it. June is quick, rude to adults, a little too pleased with herself, and Reid plays all that without asking us to like her, which is why we do. She is better at this than the FBI, and the film knows that is ridiculous and lets Daniel Henney’s Agent Park be politely useless about it. The film’s warmest thread is Joaquim de Almeida as Javi, a man in Cartagena hired through an app for a few dollars an hour to go and look at a hotel. He does the looking on his phone, held out in front of him, and the two of them become something like friends across a bad connection. Amy Landecker, as Grace’s lawyer friend Heather, and Megan Suri, as June’s friend Veena, are useful and underused.
We were tense at the airport, properly tense, watching passengers stream past a girl holding a sign, and we stayed tense through the first hour of digging. The film is sharp about how the internet actually works: the password reused across three accounts, the ex who still has access, the true-crime series playing in a corner of the screen about a case not unlike this one. Then, around the seventy-minute mark, the film reveals something, and then reveals something about the reveal, and then does it again. There was a moment in the last half hour, which we will not describe, when we laughed out loud at something meant to frighten us, and felt a bit sorry for a film that had been so careful up to then.
Julian Scherle’s score does not help; it leans on every reveal to tell us how big it is, when the format’s whole strength is that a notification sound can do that on its own. The script by Merrick and Johnson is best when it is watching June think and worst when it is arranging the next surprise, and by the end it is doing almost nothing else. It also has something to say about our appetite for other people’s disasters, and says it once, well, and then several more times.
Searching had one father, one daughter and one question, and it held its nerve. Missing has a better lead and twice as many twists, and the twists are the problem. There is a joke in it about the earlier film that made us grin, and then made us suspect the writers had noticed the comparison before we did.
Watch it at home, on a laptop if you have one, where the screen in the film and the screen in your hands are the same size and the trick works best. It runs 111 minutes and carries a 15. Stop trusting it at the hour mark and you will have a good time.
