Missing
“Missing” isn’t so much a sequel to “Searching” as another spinoff in what feels like the growing Searching Cinematic Universe. In the midst of an early montage, one of many sights and sounds that send us spiraling, it briefly nods to the mystery at the heart of the 2018 smash hit.
In “Searching,” a father looks for his daughter entirely within screens laptops, cellphones, surveillance footage. “Missing” uses the same narrative structure but this time it’s a daughter looking for her mother. But lightning rarely strikes twice and “Missing” lacks the surprise value of its brilliantly executed predecessor.
“Searching,” which may have sounded like a gimmick but worked because it was relatable even within its eerie setup, featured John Cho as a man desperate to find his child by delving into her online activities. As we watch him go through those logical paces in our seats yes, I would have thought of that too, we tell ourselves Cho is tremendous in close-up for nearly the entire film. There is nowhere to hide and he plays every flicker of hope and fear with beautiful nuance.
This time around, however, we’re with an 18 year old high school senior (Storm Reid) who’s grown up with this technology all her life rather than a middle aged dad figuring it out on the fly. If John Cho is Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra through broadband connection problems and spotty WiFi routers, Reid’s June is Lydia Tár leading the Berlin Philharmonic on FaceTime, Venmo and Spotify.
She multitasks like nobody’s business, she could probably reboot your router while paying for your tacos with Apple Pay and sharing her Spotify playlist mash-ups on Instagram Live. (Actually that would be kind of fun!) June spends her days hopping between tabs and clacking away at her keyboard, frequently leaves the camera running on her computer so we can see into her bedroom and how she interacts with people IRL. Reid has a warm, winning screen presence and she quickly establishes that June is both smart and a smart ass.
But then, after Grace (a terrific Nia Long) goes missing along with her new boyfriend, Kevin (Ken Leung), on what was supposed to be a trip to Colombia which June also captures on her cellphone because it’s programmed to start recording the moment they arrive at baggage claim at LAX all of her instincts and years spent online really pay off. We share in her mounting panic as she struggles to communicate with the Spanish only speaking front desk clerk at a hotel in Cartagena. But she’s such a resourceful troubleshooter, she realizes she can navigate this city through Google maps from afar and with the help of a Javi (Joaquim de Almeida), who serves as an errand runner for hire via Taskrabbit style app and brings some much needed warmth and humor to this otherwise suspenseful situation.
With every password cracked, every site visited and email read, June raises more questions than she answers and “Missing” keeps re questioning these characters. Trying to figure out what’s really happening here is a blast, but as Grace’s disappearance becomes national news it’s clear Johnson and Merrick want to talk about the ghoulishness of glomming onto tragedy. A big way “Missing” has grown from “Searching,” is the inclusion of podcasters and TikTokers analyzing every detail of the case, forming baseless opinions and spreading conspiracy theories for their own fame; it’s both funny and sad at once. Another new touch that works well for the directors is using Ring security video, which wasn’t as common when the first film came out, as a tension building device, we see just enough to know there’s more we can’t.
However, if “M3GAN” was an amusingly crazy tale about what could go wrong if you rely too much on technology, “Missing” ends up being a love letter to everything it can do. It also serves as a good reminder that our passwords shouldn’t include our childhood dogs’ names or our kids’ birthdays.
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