Missing a worthy follow-up to screen thriller Searching

4 stars

Telling a story through screens is no longer a new or groundbreaking idea.

When Searching came along in 2019 we hadn't seen too much of this technique, but with the past few years of COVID and Zoom calls, screen-based communication has been a big part of our lives.

Despite this, the folks behind Searching - the incredible John Cho thriller, where he searches high and low to find his missing daughter by trawling through her online life - deliver a fast-paced, heart-racer of a mystery thriller with the follow-up Missing.

The new film, directed by Nicholas D Johnson and Will Merrick, shares no narrative link with its predecessor, but is a spiritual sequel in style and theme.

When Missing kicks off, it at first feels like the filmmakers may have been leaning too heavily on the Searching script for inspiration but - as we'll continue to find out again and again throughout the almost two-hour run-time - things are not always as they seem.

This time around we follow teen June (Storm Reid, The Invisible Man) as she realises her mother Grace (Nia Long, Big Momma's House) and her partner Kevin (Ken Leung, Lost) have not returned home from their trip to Colombia and she can't get hold of them.

She immediately contacts everyone she can think of for help, but faces roadblocks in getting the speedy response she wants. The FBI can't investigate until she fills out some paperwork, and she can't do that until office hours open the next day.

In the meantime, June calls on the locals for assistance using the Colombian equivalent of AirTasker or TaskRabbit - an Uber-like service which allows users to pay other people to complete tasks for them. She finds Javi (Joaquim de Almeida from Fast Five, playing a good guy for a change), who helps her do a number of things on the ground that she'd never be able to accomplish from the US.

On home soil, June uses all the technology she can to track down anything about her mother and Kevin's movements in Colombia, and before they left.

The ease with which she hacks into Kevin's accounts - holding no greater computing skill than the average teen - is actually quite frightening, and will leave viewers questioning their own password habits and account security.

As the film barrels ahead at cracking pace, more and more secrets are discovered, leading to new questions that need to be answered.

The story goes wild in the media, and we see a microcosm of the larger media trend when following a story - those involved start off as relatable and sympathetic, before being inevitably turned on for something that pops up in their past.

We also see "commentators" of all descriptions passing judgement on June and her family despite knowing little about the case - as we see so often in the coverage of true-crime stories in real life.

Missing is filled with surprising twists and turns, and everything is presented with such pace that each new development will leave you on the edge of your seat.

It's one of those films where you find yourself gesturing wildly at the characters to do something different, or "look over there" or remember that one thing you saw on the side of the screen half an hour ago.

It seems impossible to watch this one without talking at the characters on the big screen, urging them to make better decisions.

The film is also a lesson in how vastly different things look once you get the full picture, not just the edited, manufactured version that's been curated for your consumption.

If you like a captivating thriller, you won't want to miss Missing.