The new mystery thriller arrives this Friday.
It is no coincidence that Missing kicks off with an episode of Unfiction, a made-up Netflix true-crime docu-series, retelling the events of 2018 movie Searching, to which Missing is a sort-of-but-not-really sequel. That is because this new thriller has the kind of murder-mystery plot that you could imagine that executives at Netflix would happily sign a deal with the devil to get the rights to.
Much like Searching, which played out pretty much exclusively on laptop and phone screens, Missing’s techno-thriller angle makes its protagonist much more tech-savvy, but drops them into a much more dire situation. After a few days of heavy partying while her mother Grace (Nia Long) and her soon-to-be-stepdad Kevin (Ken Leung) are on holidays in Colombia, teenager June (Storm Reid) heads to the airport to collect them, but they never show up.
When local LA law enforcement prove to be no help, she contacts Colombian freelance worker Javier (Joaquim de Almeida) to track down the hotel her mom was staying in, only to discover she had left days earlier, abandoning all of her belongings in the process. And that is where the mystery kicks into high gear…
Using everything at her disposal, from social media geo-locations to online back accounts to live camera feeds of popular tourist spots, Storm Reid really sells us the descent into pure paranoia as she fears the worst, while also discovering she may not have known her own mother as well as she thought she did.
First time writer/directors Will Merrick and Nick Johnson keep the tension ramped up to the max for most of the first hour, piling on one crazy hairpin plot twist or potential red herring after another until you’re not sure who to trust anymore. It doesn’t quite stick the landing once the actual actual mystery has been revealed, and there will be practically zero want or need to ever rewatch it again, but while you’re on it, it makes for one hell of a ride.
Missing arrives in Irish cinemas on Friday, 21 April.
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