Back in 2018 Searching starring John Cho came along, a smart little film about a kidnapped teen told entirely via the medium of screens— computers, mobile phones, video monitors and what have you. It was a fun formal experiment that popularised a whole subgenre known as “screenlife”. And now we’re getting a sequel of sorts in the form of Missing, which is in cinemas now.
Don’t go expecting Cho or co-star Debra Messing to show up in this one, though; Missing is a self-contained sequel that jettisons the earlier film in favour of telling a completely new story. Storm Reid (A Wrinkle in Time) stars as June, who lives with her mother, Grace (Nia Long) after the death of her father and hasn’t exactly warmed to her mum’s new boyfriend, Kevin (Ken Leung). When Grace and Kevin hie off to Colombia for a romantic getaway, she’s left to her own devises under the lax supervision of her mum’s bestie, Heather (Amy Landecker).
However, when Kevin and Grace don’t make their flight home and seem to have completely disappeared, June brings all her Gen Z internet savvy to bear on the mystery, even going so far as to hire a Colombian local, Javier (Joaquim de Almeida, always a welcome presence) via a Fiverr-type app to do the on-the-ground legwork. It soon emerges that Kevin has form for financially exploiting lonely women—but the story goes deeper than that.
The fun here is in how the film uses and sometimes gets around its self-imposed formal constraints, offering us a thriller that not only acknowledges but embraces out interconnected, terminally online existence. Sure, it reminds us that we’re all living in a kind of digital panopticon, but that’s the price we pay for overnight Amazon delivery, we guess.
