“Missing” Movie Review by Rafy Mediavila (@Rmediavilla) #MissingMovie
When her mother (Nia Long) disappears while on vacation in Colombia with her new boyfriend, June’s (Storm Reid) search for answers is hindered by international red tape. Stuck thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, June creatively uses all the latest technology at her fingertips to try and find her before it’s too late. But as she digs deeper, her digital sleuthing raises more questions than answers… and when June unravels secrets about her mom, she discovers that she never really knew her at all.
I have many reasons why I was excited to come into the screening of “Missing”, the most obvious one being that is produced by the same people behind “Searching”, and as someone that absolutely fell in love with the narrative and story behind “Searching”, I knew I was going to fall in love with “Missing” the same way. Much like in “Searching” this movie uses the same strategy of keeping the audience in the protagonist’s perspective as this mystery unfolds. While in “Searching:” the narrative gets told from the parent’s perspective, in “Missing” we switch it around and have the young adults’ perspective of the situation.
One of the first things that stood out from the movie was how writers Will Merrick and Nicholas D. Johnson Showcase all the different technologies that can be used today to exploit to find somebody who will be missing. It goes without saying that they clearly did their assignment in understanding the technology behind how you use all the different devices and tools to successfully create a trail of breadcrumbs to lead you to the place of whomever you are looking for, something I feel a lot of GenZers will enough throughout the movie.
Another factor that stood out to me was even though the story played out as a dramatic situation the writers did a great job at putting funny commentary from time to time to light up the mood. Performance wise actress Storm Reid carries the film from start to finish with a little help from veteran actor Joaquim de Almeida.
Ultimately this is just a movie that is main purpose is to captivate an audience and entertain them during this journey of trying to find somebody that went missing by showcasing both the positive side and negative side of how much technology has evolved to make something that back in the day seems difficult now less troublesome. And without a doubt it gets the job done perfectly.
