The Overachieving Sequel Missing is a Savvy Combination of Cyber-Thriller and Cinematic True Crime

The follow-up to Searching uses the technology of today to tell and overly twisty yet compelling tale of deception, lies and international intrigue

The 2018 sleeper hit Searching told the story of a father’s desperate search for his sixteen year old daughter in a newfangled manner. The thriller is an example of the surprisingly voluminous Screenlife sub-genre, a type of film in which all of the events depicted are shown on a cellphone, or computer screen, or some other form of contemporary technology. 

It’s an audacious new form of cinema that reflects how we live our lives online and in doing so leave digital footprints everywhere we go. The rise of computers, smartphones, body cams, surveillance cameras and the internet have made the world infinitely more knowable. 

We live in a world with cameras everywhere, and sinister organizations tracking our every move yet we still somehow managed to get lost, go missing and end up dead.

Searching’s standalone sequel Missing is subsequently deeply rooted in contemporary technology but it’s equally informed by a ubiquitous, incredibly popular form of storytelling that has thrived on iPhones and iPods: true crime. 

Missing savvily and shamelessly borrows from the conventions and cliches of true crime to deliver a thriller plugged into the cultural zeitgeist and our profound ambivalence about the way technology makes our lives as well as lonelier and less authentic. 

The terrific and likable Storm Reid stars as June, a rebellious teenager with a tight relationship with her adorably neurotic, Siri-addicted single mother Grace (Nia Long). Reid and Long have tremendous chemistry. The bond between these two strong-willed survivors is the glue that holds the film together. Long is relatable and vulnerable despite being one of the most beautiful women in the world. 

Missing reverses the central dynamic of Searching. Instead of a concerned father looking for his teenage daughter Missing follows June as she tries to track down her young and attractive mother after she goes missing during a trip to Columbia with her adoring entrepreneur boyfriend Kevin (Ken Leung).

June doesn’t speak Spanish so she uses the Columbian equivalent of Task Rabbit to hire local Javier (Joaquim de Almeida) to act on her behalf. She hires him specifically because he’s cheap but he proves a resourceful and loyal friend. He’s a sympathetic character with real depth and dignity when he easily could have been a xenophobic cartoon.

Javier helps June because he’s being paid modestly to do so but also because he likes her and can empathize with her predicament. Missing’s emphasis on our complicated and fraught relationship with technology never gets in the way of its messy humanity. 

Like many a true crime podcast obsessive, June becomes an amateur sleuth as she investigates a disappearance that gets progressively darker and stranger. Her search for her mother’s present whereabouts leads her on a journey into her mother and Kevin’s online romance that forces her to come to terms with her mother as a lonely woman in search of love. She’s forced to see her mother the way Kevin sees her. That humanizes her, to her daughter and the audiences alike, on an even deeper level. 

June is at first concerned with finding out where her mother and her mother’s boyfriend are. Then she becomes obsessed with finding out who her mother and her boyfriend are and then finally what they are. 

Missing isn’t just the cinematic equivalent of a deeply satisfying if ultimately overly convoluted true crime podcast. Thematically it veers into true crime podcast territory as well when the juicy story of a beloved mother’s disappearance in a distant land blows up and becomes a major news story, complete with TikTok detectives giving their own two cents about what happened and who is to blame. 

Missing’s beat are fundamentally true crime beats. We begin with a story that is engaging on the most surface, superficial level: a single mother goes missing during a trip to Columbia with her mysterious new boyfriend, leading her smart and passionate daughter to use the technological tools at her disposal to try to find a woman thousands of miles away in another continent and another world. 

Then comes the big twist. In a not entirely unexpected turn of events, Rose’s sketchy new boyfriend is not who he seems to be and a seemingly perfect relationship proves more complicated than it appears from the outside. 

Then, in the nature of true crime and true crime podcasts, more than one character isn’t at all what they appear to be. By the time Missing reaches its climax seemingly no one is who they appear to be. Missing has twist after twist after twist after twist. 

To be perfectly honest, Missing might have one or two twists too many. June’s free-floating fear and anxiety and guilt over not being able to locate or connect with her mother is compelling enough without an endless series of surprises designed to question everything that we think we know about these characters and the universe that they inhabit. 

I recently watched Reid as the protagonist of Ava DuVernay’s ill-fated adaptation of Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and I was struck by the surprising commonalities between the two films and the two performances. 

A Wrinkle in Time and Missing are very different experiences. A Wrinkle in Time is a fantasy rich in spectacle about a world beyond our imagination. Missing, in sharp contrast, is a psychological thriller/horror film grounded in the mundane cyber-realities of everyday life. 

But in both films Reid plays a biracial daughter mourning the loss of an idyllic white father who might not actually be as lost as he might seem. Like M3Gan, which I watched last week for this Substack, Missing is rooted in the brutal, all too relatable emotions of grief. 

The sad little girl in M3gan and June are defined largely by the traumatic death of a parent and the profound emptiness it leaves in their lives. I was so emotionally invested in June’s lingering sadness over her father’s passing that when the screenplay upends that grief it feels fundamentally dishonest, like a betrayal of the film’s surprising verisimilitude. 

Missing travels too far into Shyamalan country towards the end but I was otherwise impressed by it. Missing uses our over-reliance on screens to pump new blood into an exhausted new genre while also saying something trenchant about who we are and how we live lives increasingly dominated by technology and all of its wonders and horrors.