‘Missing’ is the Crime Thriller 2023 Deserves
Written for Columbia Graduate School of Journalism
Missing opens with an Easter egg. 18-year-old June Allen (played by Storm Reid) is watching a Netflix true crime show called Unfiction about the disappearance of Margot Kim. That case is the plot of Searching, Missing’s spiritual prequel with whom it shares writers Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian (who also executive produced the new film).
Like Searching and in the vein of 2014’s Unfriended, Missing is a screenlife thriller that unfolds on various apps — iMessage, email — as well as found footage, like FaceTime and Ring video. The tech is updated (the movie unfolds over Apple software compared to Searching’s clunky Windows computer), but the basics are the same: a single parent and their daughter are rocked by a disappearance. This time, June’s searching for her mom, Grace (played by Nia Long), who doesn’t come home after a trip to Cartagena with her nerdy boyfriend Kevin (Ken Leung). June hacks into Gmail accounts and juggles multiple tabs and programs — even new software — as if it’s second nature. It’s a smoother pace than watching John Cho in Searching fumble his way around the internet.
Reid, who made her acting debut in 12 Years a Slave and has since appeared in A Wrinkle in Time and Euphoria, captivates through the screens. When, for instance (spoiler ahead) she discovers Kevin is a con artist, viewers see the haunted look in her eyes — not easy to convey via grainy iPhone footage. Long, meanwhile, projects the mom version of the down-to-earth charm she became known for in roles like Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: It’s sweet every time she doesn’t realize she’s already connected to a FaceTime call.
Watching June’s investigation unfold through various apps feels endemic to the way these cases play out in real life. How many people, post-Don’t F**k With Cats, have thought they too could solve a crime using just their internet connection? Soon, Grace’s disappearance turns into a frenzy. We see clips of press conferences and podcasts, Twitter hashtags and TikTok videos. To see these videos flood the screen, one after the other, is much more powerful than watching a character watch them. It fills the viewer with glee, that Chaganty and Ohanian got it so spot-on — and then a prick of shame, that people’s personal tragedies have become a spectator sport.
Missing was filmed in the spring of 2021, but it feels especially of-the-moment. When Gabby Petito disappeared in August 2021, #gabbypetito was viewed 268 million times on TikTok, yet one Youtube video helped police narrow down her whereabouts. When four college students were found stabbed to death in their off-campus house in Moscow, Idaho in November 2022, internet detectives slandered an ex-boyfriend, blamed one of the surviving roommates, and falsely accused a professor who’d never even met the victims.
At the end of the movie, after watching her own story adapted for Unfiction, June calls the show “garbage” and questions why people watch it. This would be an indictment, but tactically, the film rewards this voyeurism. June and her friend Veena (played by Megan Suri) unravel the first big twist by looking through Kevin’s blocked Gmail contacts, which they learned from Unfiction. June traces her mother’s movements using live webcams of tourist hotspots, which Veena tells her about after seeing it on (you guessed it) Unfiction.
Still, Chaganty and Ohanian’s films do challenge the status quo in a subtler way: They avoid exemplifying Missing White Woman Syndrome. Searching dealt with an Asian teenager who vanishes; Missing is about the disappearance of a 43-year-old Black woman. According to a Columbia Journalism Review analysis called “How Much Press Are You Worth?”, a woman like Grace would only merit 10 news stories total. Is the answer to the disparity in media coverage to turn everyone’s tragedies into a circus, not just white people’s? Maybe not, but at least it’s not contributing to that problem.
Missing shows us the problems of crime entertainment, but stops short at proposing solutions. While it would be cheesy and exhausting to watch every Gone Girl varietal through FaceTime, when done right (and sparingly), screenlife thrillers are perfectly poised to tackle the current era of true crime cognitive dissonance, because they hold up a mirror to the genre without letting fans off the hook.
Image credit: Temma Hankin