Miss­ing

“Screen­life” at one point seemed poised as the suc­ces­sor to found footage as the new low-bud­get film­mak­ing gim­mick. Whilst the for­mat has pro­duced some enjoy­able hor­rors and thrillers – Spree and both Unfriend­ed films are par­tic­u­lar high­lights – it nev­er took off in the way it once seemed des­tined to. Per­haps hav­ing to lim­it the films to only tak­ing place on lap­top and phone screens was sim­ply too restric­tive for direc­tors, or per­haps it was because the moniker ​“screen­life” is kind of rub­bish. Regard­less, Miss­ing, a sort-of sequel to the 2019 film Search­ing, revives the format.

Watch­ing films of this kind on the big screen is always a slight­ly odd idea. In many ways they might work best watched on a stream­ing site on someone’s lap­top or phone screen, but Miss­ing direc­tors Will Mer­rick and Nick John­son find cre­ative ways to make things seem cin­e­mat­ic. While pre­vi­ous screen­life films such as Unfriend­ed and its sequel went take place essen­tial­ly in real time, being care­ful not to include any non-diegetic ele­ments, Miss­ing, takes place over an extend­ed peri­od of time, fea­tur­ing a score and nee­dle­drops as well as cuts, and even shifts between which par­tic­u­lar screen the ​“cam­era” is look­ing at.

This is most effec­tive in the mid­dle sec­tion of the film, where Storm Reid’s June is sud­den­ly sub­ject to a social media onslaught of Tik­Tok true crime influ­encers dis­cussing the dis­ap­pear­ance of her moth­er. It’s a smart lit­tle moment that points to the inter­net-lit­er­ate skills of those behind the film. Most of the online log­ic of the film is sound, although the film’s twisty nature fre­quent­ly push­es the bound­aries of real-life believability.

June is a like­able anchor for the film, and Reid man­ages to sell the sit­u­a­tion despite those log­ic-gaps. The film’s hook is instant­ly inter­est­ing, too: Grace (Nia Long) leaves daugh­ter June alone for a week and goes on hol­i­day to Colom­bia with her new boyfriend Kevin (Ken Leung). June goes to meet them at the air­port on the day they’re due to return but they nev­er show. The per­spec­tive shift from wor­ried par­ent in Search­ing to a teenage girl here is much more effec­tive – of course the film would be filmed entire­ly over screens, because that’s how June expe­ri­ences the world.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly the film piles on twist after twist until it ends up in dark ter­ri­to­ry it doesn’t feel equipped to han­dle, and the mood sours due to the deploy­ment of a seri­ous sub­ject mat­ter as sim­ply a shock­ing twist. Films like this obvi­ous­ly can go there, but going there instant­ly pulled this film from being a fun thriller into some­thing nas­ti­er, and it wasn’t able to shift the actu­al tone with it.

There’s also a thread of voyeurism that feels unful­filled – June is sub­ject to inter­net scruti­ny that she her­self par­tic­i­pates in, but even when she’s trawl­ing through a curi­ous­ly sex­less dat­ing app con­ver­sa­tion between her mum and Kevin, there’s a dis­tinct lack of queasi­ness which might have added an edge to the film. It’s momen­tar­i­ly enjoy­able but I have an unde­ni­able feel­ing that I might queue it up on Net­flix lat­er in the year for­get­ting that I’ve already watched it.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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