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Review Missing

Pat Padua l For The Washington Post Trailer youtu.be/sebixtcx19e

MISSING

It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your parents are?

Missing flips the script on parental anxiety in a moderately successful thriller that follows a teenage girl desperate to find her mother. Unfolding entirely on laptop and smartphone screens, it doesn’t make for pleasant viewing. But the cluttered visuals drive home an ambivalence about the digital age — one that isn’t entirely resolved.

Storm Reid stars as June, who as the movie begins is excited to have the house to herself, just as soon as her single mother, Grace (Nia Long), flies off to Colombia on vacation with her new boyfriend, Kevin (Ken Leung). Naturally, June hosts a bacchanalian revel, waking up the next day with a giant hangover. That adolescent regret is soon exacerbated by a new worry: Mom didn’t make her return flight.

If the plot seems familiar, the premise inverts that of the 2018 film Searching, which was edited by this film’s directors, Nicholas D. Johnson and Will Merrick, and in which John Cho played a single father looking for his missing teenage daughter. Structurally, the two films are practically identical, with the crisis launched at point A, a twist deployed at point B, and computers nearly shut down at point C — just before an amazing revelation sends us inexorably to point D. Both films are about the ways technology isolates us and how the same technology, with no small thanks to the surveillance state, can help bring us back together.

But despite being pretty much the same movie with a different cast, Missing manages to be fairly engaging.

It helps that the final act is not quite as ridiculous as the red herring that weighed down Searching. And while you wouldn’t think watching a series of pop-up windows inside other pop-up windows would be a good way to flesh out relationships and character, a few performances stand out. (Cho, for his part, was quite memorable in the previous film.)

Reid is believable as a young woman who shifts from youthful indifference to concern and caretaking. And Joaquim de Almeida pulls off an even neater trick as a Colombian man who answers June’s request for help searching the streets where Grace disappeared: He develops a rapport with June that evolves from mere errand runner to something like a genuine (albeit long-distance) friendship.

Missing is still a one-trick pony, but its disembodied narrative is probably here to stay. While Missing is just a cheap thriller, one can’t help but wonder whether, in the hands of more inventive filmmakers, the screen time that has come to define personal interaction might find a richer dramatic purpose.

Thriller, rated PG-13, 111 minutes, Regal Santa Fe Place 6, Regal Stadium 14, Violet Crown, 2.5 chiles

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2023-01-27T08:00:00.0000000Z

2023-01-27T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://enewmexican.com/article/281767043357282

Santa Fe New Mexican