Missing, the best mystery thriller of the year, is now on Netflix
It’s rare that a mystery movie feels new. From the world’s greatest detectives to based-on-a-beach-read thrillers, movies have mined the mystery genre for nearly all it’s worth over the years. Which is why it’s so nice when something like Missing comes along and shakes up the formula a little bit.
Missing is the 2023 follow-up to 2018’s Searchingand follows June Allen (Storm Reid), a teenager who never really knew her father and loves (but doesn’t always get along with) her doing-her-best single mom — and she gets along even worse with her mom’s latest boyfriend. Despite that difficulty, when her mom mysteriously disappears in the middle of a trip to Mexico, June jumps into action, using everything at her disposal as an amateur online detective to find her.
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This premise may sound simple, but that’s by design. Missing’s real hook is that it’s told entirely through the on-screen displays of the devices that are in front of us every day. Scenes play out in Photo Booth windows, FaceTime calls, security footage played off a computer screen, video chats, or internet browsers. Everything in Missing comes straight off a screen, including all the detective work that June does. This isn’t the first movie to present its plot almost entirely through a screen, but it does take a more varied approach and changes locations more often than movies like Unfriended or its superior sequel, Unfriended: Dark Web.
This is where the movie’s cleverness really shines through. Missing is a movie that’s confident on the internet. It understands there are livestreams of most bustling public places at any given time, or that a Tasker or other gig app worker is a good way of being somewhere without having to physically go there. We even
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