---
title: "Missing"
year: 1982
kind: "film"
canonical: "https://film.one/film/missing-1982"
fi1m_score: 80
critics_score: 74
critics_reviews: 7
published: "2026-09-20T06:28:20.435978+00:00"
updated: "2026-09-20T06:28:40.243301+00:00"
region: "US"
licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL."
---

# Missing (1982)

Directed by Costa-Gavras · 2h 03m · MPA PG · Drama, Mystery, Thriller

**Fi1m score: 80** · Critics 74 from 7 reviews

*In a sentence:* Jack Lemmon flies south to collect his son and finds his passport has quietly stopped working

> Costa-Gavras’s first American film sends Jack Lemmon into a country under martial law to find his son, and Lemmon is superb: patient, polite and slowly boiling. The staging sometimes overreaches and Vangelis’s theme is played too often, but the anger holds.

## Synopsis

A military coup has taken place in a South American country the film never names (it is Chile, 1973, and everyone knew). Charles Horman (John Shea), an American writer, is stranded in a seaside town with his friend Terry Simon (Melanie Mayron), where American servicemen buy them drinks and talk too freely. In the capital, his wife Beth Horman (Sissy Spacek) is caught after curfew as the shooting starts. Charles gets home; days later soldiers take him from the house. His father Ed Horman (Jack Lemmon), a businessman who has never approved of his son’s politics, flies down to bring him back. Consul Phil Putnam (David Clennon) and Captain Ray Tower (Charles Cioffi) are polite, helpful and evasive. Ed and Beth start looking for themselves.

## Review

[*Missing*](https://film.one/film/missing) is Costa-Gavras’s first American film, and he has made it about America, from the inside. Ed Horman (Jack Lemmon), a businessman who votes the way his neighbours do, flies into a country under martial law to fetch his son, and the film is the record of everything he believed being taken off him, piece by piece. It is a good film, angry and well made, and it is carried by Lemmon. When it overreaches, and it does, he is usually the one who saves it.

Lemmon is an actor we think of as unable to keep still, and here he barely moves for the first hour. Ed arrives in a suit, shakes hands, thanks people, and assumes the machinery will work because it always has. His early scenes with Beth (Sissy Spacek), Charles’s wife, are the best-written in the film: he tells her the young man’s politics were childish, she tells him he never listened, and both are half right. The moment that got to us comes without music. Ed stops arguing with her because he has realised she is the only person in the country on his side, and Lemmon plays the shift with almost nothing. He stops talking, and then he starts listening.

Spacek has the other half of the film and the sequence we cannot shake. Beth is caught out when curfew falls and spends the night flat in a doorway while trucks pass and shots go off in the dark. Ricardo Aronovich shoots these nights in orange streetlight and black, and at one point a white horse gallops down the empty avenue past the bodies. We were frightened, properly frightened, because nobody had told Beth what the rules were and the film would not tell us either. Françoise Bonnot cuts it slowly, holding on Spacek’s face long enough that we counted the shots with her.

Then the Americans arrive, and Donald E. Stewart’s screenplay, written with Costa-Gavras, is shrewd about them. Consul Phil Putnam (David Clennon) makes phone calls and finds nothing. Captain Ray Tower (Charles Cioffi) is a genial naval man who drinks with the Hormans and tells stories. None of them lies to Ed’s face at first; they offer coffee, forms and assurances that these things take time. Peter Jamison’s production design gives the Americans cool offices with flags and good chairs, and the hospitals and the detention stadium peeling walls and fluorescent tubes. The stadium scene, in which Ed is handed a loudspeaker and calls his son’s name to thousands of men in the stands, moved us more than we expected.

What does not work is the decoration. Vangelis’s piano theme is lovely the first time and is still being played, unchanged, the sixth. The film reconstructs Charles’s last free days from witnesses’ accounts, and Costa-Gavras stages these in a soft, half-remembered light that makes them look less like evidence than a dream, the wrong direction for a film building a case. Charles himself, played with decency by John Shea, is thinner than he needs to be, a nice young man with a notebook, and Terry Simon (Melanie Mayron) is largely there to have been present. The strongest scenes in *Missing* are the plainest, a desk, a form, a man being told no, and the film does not always trust them.

Joe I. Tompkins keeps Ed in his jacket and tie while everyone around him sweats, and the suit becomes the last certainty he has left. Against Costa-Gavras’s own work this is the warmest thing he has made: for once the machinery grinds down a family rather than an idea. The country is never named. The events are drawn from the disappearance of a real Charles Horman in the Chilean coup of 1973, but the refusal to say so gives the film the manner of a fable, and Costa-Gavras wants both the fable and the indictment.

It runs 123 minutes and carries a 15 certificate, mostly for what is glimpsed rather than shown. The second half goes where we will not describe, and the last quarter of an hour is hard going. Watch it with anyone who still thinks a passport is a promise.

*Fi1m score 80, published 20 September 2026.*

### Reviews we read (7)

- **The AV Club**, Scott Tobias (A-): The critic highlights Jack Lemmon's heartbreaking performance as a conservative American businessman searching for his missing son amid the Chilean coup. The film powerfully reveals the conscience of a nation confronting its government's complicity in the horrors. [Read](https://www.avclub.com/missing-1798205078)
- **The New York Times**, Vincent Canby (90/100, inferred): Canby hails it as Costa-Gavras's most beautifully achieved political melodrama to date, a suspense-thriller of real cinematic style with immense authority from Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek that delivers terrific emotional impact. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/12/movies/missing-by-costa-gavras.html)
- **Empire**, William Thomas (80/100, inferred): The critic praises this emotional political thriller inspired by real events in Chile, highlighting its mix of outrage and personal drama. Jack Lemmon's performance as a father turning to rage is singled out as superb, with Costa-Gavras maintaining strong pace and balance. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/missing-2-review/)
- **Radio Times** (4/5): The US State Department denounced this uncompromising human drama on its first release, but it proved to be Costa-Gavras's most accessible Kafka-esque nightmare. It is a compelling moral tale of a disappearance during the 1973 Chilean coup, brought to life with incredible immediacy and impact. [Read](https://www.radiotimes.com/movie-guide/b-qh3bjx/missing/)
- **Time Out**, DP (70/100, inferred): The critic calls it Costa-Gavras's extraordinary first American movie based on true events during the 1973 Chilean coup. Spacek and Lemmon are fine, but the unending night-time imagery of a society coming apart makes it overwhelming, underpinned by the atmosphere of a paranoid conspiracy thriller. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/missing)
- **Variety**, Variety Staff (70/100, inferred): The review notes the film's focus on US involvement in the 1973 Chile coup and praises Jack Lemmon as superior in confronting unwanted issues and Sissy Spacek as fully believable, highlighting its effective personal-level impact. [Read](https://variety.com/1981/film/reviews/missing-2-1200425165/)
- **RogerEbert.com**, Roger Ebert (40/100, inferred): Ebert finds the film undermined by stylistic excesses that prevent a clear, powerful statement, though he praises the performances of Sissy Spacek and Jack Lemmon along with the scenes depicting bureaucratic frustration. [Read](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/missing-1982)

## Details

- **Director:** Costa-Gavras
- **Director:** Costa-Gavras
- **Screenplay:** Costa-Gavras, Donald E. Stewart
- **Cinematography:** Ricardo Aronovich
- **Editor:** Françoise Bonnot
- **Music:** Vangelis
- **Production design:** Peter Jamison
- **Costume design:** Joe I. Tompkins
- **Producer:** Edward Lewis, Mildred Lewis
- **Cast:** Jack Lemmon as Ed Horman; Sissy Spacek as Beth Horman; Melanie Mayron as Terry Simon; John Shea as Charles Horman; Charles Cioffi as Captain Ray Tower; David Clennon as Consul Phil Putnam; Richard Venture as U.S. Ambassador; Jerry Hardin as Colonel Sean Patrick
- **Runtime:** 2h 03m
- **Certificate (MPA):** PG
- **Release (the US):** 12 March 1982
- **Genres:** Drama, Mystery, Thriller
- **Also in:** [Best Picture winners](https://film.one/collections/oscar-best-picture.md) (Nominee, 1982); [BAFTA Best Film winners](https://film.one/collections/bafta-best-film.md) (Nominee, 1982); [Golden Globe Best Drama winners](https://film.one/collections/golden-globe-drama.md) (Nominee, 1982); [Palme d'Or winners](https://film.one/collections/palme-dor.md) (Winner, 1982)
- **Budget:** $10 million
- **Box office:** $14 million

## Where to watch in the US

- Amazon Prime Video: rent $3.99, hd
- Amazon Prime Video: buy $14.99, hd

*Checked 2026-09-20.*

Also available in: BE, CH, ES, FR, IN, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country.

## Awards

- Academy Awards 1983: Best Actor (nominated); Best Actress (nominated); Best Picture (nominated); Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay (won)
- Writers Guild of America Award 1983: Writers Guild of America Award (won)
- Cannes Film Festival 1982: Palme d'Or (won)

## If you liked this

- *Z* (1969), Fi1m 84: Costa-Gavras’s earlier and faster film about a political killing and the cover-up that follows. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/z.md)
- *The Official Story* (1985): An Argentine mother begins to ask where her adopted daughter came from.
- *Machuca* (2004): Two Santiago schoolboys, one rich and one poor, in the months before the coup.
- *The Killing Fields* (1984), Fi1m 82: A journalist and his Cambodian colleague, and what a foreign passport is worth. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/the-killing-fields.md)
- *No* (2012), Fi1m 91: Chile votes on Pinochet, and an advertising man sells democracy like a soft drink. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/no-country-for-old-men.md)

---
© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/missing-1982