It seemed, for a brief moment, that film-makers had crafted an entirely new way of watching a thriller back in the mid-2010s. After the found footage boom had started to lose audiences and all sense of logic (if you didn’t scream “why the hell are you still filming?” at a screen in that era then you really didn’t live), an even cheaper A -to-produce subgenre emerged, replacing a shaky cam with one that never even moves at all. Films such as Unfriended, Open Windows and The Den took place entirely on someone’s laptop screen, a cyber-horror update that was supposed to resonate with an audience whose lives also did the same.
But it wasn’t until a few years later, in 2018, when Aneesh Chaganty’s nifty debut Searching truly maximized the new medium, focusing less on demons and more on detectives. His film saw a single dad, played by John Cho, desperately search for help online to track down his missing daughter. A mystery was solved in ways that we often solve lesser mysteries ourselves, with internet assistance. It was a deserved hit but five years later, when we’re even further from what ended up being less a big new trend and more a tiny blip, a spin-off/sequel lands in cinemas, audience interest to be determined.
Missing tells a similar story – a strained parent-daughter relationship, a baffling disappearance, all unfolding on a MacBook – but, as is often the case with sequels, ups the ante considerably with newer tech, bigger twists and wider world-building. The characters are unrelated to those in the original but there are ties (the lead watches a Netflix series based on what happened) and other Easter eggs for those invested enough to look for them.
The dynamic has also flipped this time around with daughter (Euphoria’s Storm Reid) looking for parent (Nia Long, having a welcome moment with this and The Best Man series on Peacock), who heads on vacation with her boyfriend (Industry’s Ken Leung) and doesn’t come back The shift in perspective means that jokes at the expense of a father’s tech shortcomings are replaced with mostly hyper-competence, a teen flexing her digital muscles as she marches her way into an online rabbit hole, fully armed. Searching’s editors turned Missing’s writer-directors Nick Johnson and Will Merrick are keenly aware that five years is more like 50 in tech so there’s less reliance on Skype and more appearances of TikTok.
Like the first, it’s propulsive and involving and, at times, genuinely innovative but in upgrading our lead to someone who is that much more skilled behind a keyboard, the film relies on scenes of extreme intelligence often directly followed by scenes of staggering stupidity in order to keep certain developments under wraps. Reid is a compelling and commanding protagonist and the makers understandably want us to see more of her but that often means that she just happens to keep leaving on her webcam or her FaceTime just so we, the audience, can see her react. Moments of far-fetched, sigh-at-the-screen incredulity are also met by an overdose of sentimentality, something that felt less gloopy in the original, which was more elegant in its estranged parent-daughter drama. Brevity is always a welcome quality for a B-movie such as this and at almost two hours, the flaws of Missing are given too much space to distract.
But sighs at incongruously dumb behavior and groans at the family soap are eventually drowned out by audible gasps at some of the wild twists, the kind that might not make much sense on reflection but do deliver cattle-prod shocks along the way. Missing might not make a strong enough case for the subgenre at large to return (talk of Unfriended 3 has been mercifully muted) but it’s entertaining enough to show that this particular series does have more battery life.