Missing

The Parent Trap

Missing
USA 2023
Directed by
Nicholas D. Johnson & Will Merrick
Stage 6 Films

Warning: Some slight spoilers here...

Missing is one of those fairly newish (maybe not so new anymore) subgenres of movies which are all set on one person’s computer laptop. They’re more often than not horror movies but, this one is a thriller. And I have to confess that I almost completely steered clear of this one since, to me, it looked like a rip off of a movie I quite liked from a few years ago called Searching (reviewed here). However, after a few weeks, I discovered (and with no thanks to the advertising campaign which obviously didn’t work on me) that it’s actually a sequel or, more accurately, follow up to that movie, written and directed by the editors (and one producer) of Searching. So I was immediately in again.

And, yeah, it is pretty much more of the same but it’s mostly being quite smart about how it delivers the information needed to decode the mystery behind the story although, it has to be said, not nearly as smart as in the first one.

This one is all about a teenager called June (or June Bug, as her mum calls her) played by Storm Reid, who is left alone in her mum’s house for a week while her mother, Grace, played by Nia Long, goes off on vacation in Colombia with her new boyfriend (ten or so years after June’s dad dies from an unspecified medical condition). However, Grace and her boyfriend Kevin (played by Ken Leung) don’t return from vacation and, despite the worst efforts of the FBI, it’s down to June, with some unlikely help from a guy called Javi (played by Joaquim de Almeida), who is her ‘man on the spot’ in Columbia, to try and track her missing parent down.

Like the first movie, this film is all created by panning around June’s laptop, with lots of open windows of her talking on Skype so we can see her face once in a while and, yeah, it’s nicely done, with a few caveats. It follows a similar patter to the first movie in terms of some of the reveals and, though I didn’t see the biggest reveal coming, I was absolutely seeing most of the main twists way before they happen. The film does telegraph itself way more than Searching did. For instance, a stream of very briefly glimpsed photos sent from the vacation near the start of the movie were, to me, noteworthy in that Grace’s head was never turned towards the camera... so it seemed obvious to me that these were deliberately staged shots for the benefit of June and, to be honest, it takes June quite a while to figure that one out.

Sometimes the cleverness of some of the scenes is played with a little too much and it does kind of give things away. For example, there’s a really great bit at the start where some of the events of the first movie are being replayed and my immediate thought was... hey, that’s not the same actor. This is then completely explained in a lovely way, within a few seconds... but I won’t tell you how. However, the writers and directors then use exactly the same trick at the end of the movie and, frankly, as soon as a shot of rushing police cars starts off a sequence, I knew exactly what they were doing. So that’s a shame but, perhaps once would have been enough or, you know, maybe don’t repeat the trick in the same way because, there’s no surprise the second time around.

Another thing which bothered me is that the final scenes of the actual story (before the usual epilogue scenes) were, by necessity and because the film makers obviously didn’t want to cheat the audience, shown by panning around and zooming in on a network of security cam screens on June’s Macbook. Which is fine but the downside of that is that all of the scenes in that final ‘action sequence’ are very blurry as a result. I guess it’s certainly a trade off and the directors made the right choice to preserve the illusion, for sure. Although, like the first movie, it’s not trying to necessarily present itself as complete reality... for instance, the movie has a score on it to help increase and maintain the mood and tension of the piece.

Now, despite its faults, I really liked Missing and, I especially loved the character of Javi. I’m wondering if there’s any scope for a third film in the series which brings together one of the characters from both films to kind of round it off as a trilogy... and maybe make one of those protagonists twist out as the antagonist or some such. Either way, this film is nowhere near as good as Searching but certainly holds its own and is definitely worth a look. This format isn’t quite played out yet and I think it still has some legs on it. Let’s see if Hollywood will let it evolve. I’m sure these things must be very low budget, allowing for a good profit margin.

Searching

Screen Of The Crime

Searching
2018 USA Directed by Aneesh Chaganty
UK cinema release print. Pre-release preview.

Okay, so Searching is a really interesting movie with a fairly fresh (or should that be refresh) take on the old police procedural style movies where a family member helps the cops to solve a crime. And it’s really great because it gives us a fairly new kind of cinematic experience ... it’s a little like the format of Unfriended (reviewed by me here) but with a much more ‘filmish’ bent to the way in which it is shot... I’ll explain that statement in a minute but this is definitely a much more sophisticated beast than the low budget horror movie mentioned above.

The plot, as you'll know if you’ve seen the trailer, is about David Kim (played by the new Mr. Sulu himself, John Cho), a father whose teenage daughter Margot (played here by Michelle La) goes missing. As events unfold, he realises that what she has been telling him about her life for the last six months and the actual reality of that are two different things. As little revelations occur, he uses various computers and online web sites to help Detective Rosemary Vick (played by Debra Messing) in her search for his girl. And that’s the basic set up and that’s mostly about all I’m going to reveal to you about the plot, such as it is.

The film starts off with a montage of David going through files on his computer... and all you see is the computer screen as he goes through various images, messages and videos and, for the next five or ten minutes, we see Margot born and how she grows up over the years. We learn about how important David’s wife, Pamela Kim (played by Sara Sohn) is to everybody and we watch her beat cancer only for it to come back and claim her life. All this set up is great, beautifully conveyed (and emotionally scored... there’s a lot of piano here too, to reflect the fact that Margot is learning the piano throughout her life) and if the sequence had just finished after that opening, I would still be heaping praise on this movie even if it turned out to be a clunker but, as it happens, the film is quite special. Here’s why...

I don’t know how I didn’t pick up on this when I saw the trailer but, the screens don’t stop when this sequence is done. The whole of the movie is told through what people, mostly David, are seeing and doing on their computer screen. You see David a lot because he’s often on Face Time or on Skype and, as you may or may not know, the camera on the computer often leaves a live feed of you and what you’re doing when nobody is on the other end of those kinds of software applications. So quite often we can see Dave in one of the windows as he fiddles with various things on screen and this gives the audience the desired stimulus to empathise completely with his character.

But this movie is way better than that... it’s not just blandly looking at a static image of one screen or another. The director takes this footage and, just as he would with first hand footage, he will zoom or pan into certain bits of the screen and edit out what’s not required to highlight and de-emphasise desired story elements. It even, as I mentioned before, has a score playing through the film... a quite effective one by Torin Borrowdale, to add tension and drama as certain revelations happen on screen.

The director also effectively uses little rest points to signal, almost subconsciously, the end of certain sequences and the beginning of others... such as using a giant shot of a blank flashing cursor quite memorably in a couple of places to usher in the next stage of the movie. There’s a lovely sequence where something fairly familiar to PC users suddenly becomes a surreal moment due to the unfamiliarity of seeing it so big on screen and with an underscore... not going to say what it is but the way it suddenly brings rest to the film’s pacing is quite brilliant.

I also enjoyed that at, one point, the film footage switches from David’s IBM compatible PC Windows machine to his daughter’s machine, which is a proper Apple Mac, because the blocky and slightly blurry picture resolution seemed to sharpen up a little while the Apple computer was telling the relevant portions of the story. As an Apple user both at work and home for over two decades, this really worked for me.

Now, I have to say that, if this was a movie shot in a standard manner, then I would have seen the ending of this film coming way before the finish. As it was though, because of the format that has been chosen to express this, my initial lead suspect (and perpetrator in this piece) was soon pushed out of my mind as I didn’t think the writers and director would even begin trying to attempt a twist of that magnitude in this kind of style. I really didn’t expect them to be running before they’d even proven they could walk but... oh yeah... they totally go where I suspected they wouldn’t for the end game of the movie and, bearing in mind the limits of the format, they really don’t cheat, much, in the way they achieve the general unfolding of the story. In fact, there’s a brilliant scene where David has set up multiple screens recorded on his computer (not being monitored by him at that time because he has to be in the footage) and, not known to him but clear to the audience, a major break in the investigation appears to be coming in from the detective but he’s not around to answer any of her calls.

Also... and again this may be due to the nature of the format... I was completely taken in by a scene where a character is suspected of ‘doing the deed’ and then it turns out to be a red herring. Was totally invested in the film being over soon after but then... things carry on and there’s a beautiful plot revelation at the eleventh hour which I won’t elaborate on here but, in keeping with the various apps and websites used throughout the movie to track and progress the investigation, it all involves around a stock photography site. Considering my own profession as a graphic designer, I especially liked this element.

So... yeah... Searching is an old school missing person yarn with a very modern setting (computer screens) but which is expressed through that modern setting by a very traditional film-making skill set, such as the use of pans, zooms, tracking shots, time edits, establishing shots of sorts (rendered as website landing pages, etc) and an accompanying musical score which is again, composed and performed fairly traditionally to capture the emotions and tension of the story. It’s all very well done and, though I hate to think it’s going to be that influential in terms of having to sit through a hundred gazillion copycat movies of this one anytime soon, I really think that lovers of cinema and the thriller genre in particular, should go and see this one. Searching hits UK cinemas at the end of August 2018 (and US cinemas next week) and is well worth a visit. My one piece of advice would be, due to the resolution of this kind of format on a big screen, that you don’t sit too near the front... get some distance on it. Definitely go and take a look at this one, though.