One of the great things about storytelling is playing around with a medium. There are many ways to tell a story through film. As an audience member, it’s fun watching filmmakers experiment and try new things. Regardless if the attempt succeeds or fails, the attempt should still be rewarded. The recent Netflix film Missing takes this to an extreme. Its tale is told entirely through screens. This idea can take many different forms from witnessing video chats, to text messages, to social media posts, to even simple security footage. Cleverly, the film also has some dramatically filmed scenes, which are revealed to be nothing more than a show being streamed on a computer.
The story is also uniquely crafted to take advantage of this concept. It involves a girl’s mother (Nia Long) who goes missing on a trip with her boyfriend. Stuck behind her computer in a different country, the girl (Storm Reid) has to investigate from afar to track her mother down and uncover the mystery. Obviously, the film is very limited in the amount of tools that it has. There are only so many things a person can do on a computer, and yet the plot is devised in a way for her to utilize all of them in order to find clues. This includes using her phone’s tracking system, search engines, and even online translation software. Furthermore, the film is expertly edited to keep the pace moving and this potentially monotonous mechanism entertaining.
For the most part, the film struggles in its first and third acts. The first third has to establish the characters without much action going on. The latter third falters because there has to be some kind of action for a dramatic climax, but this has to take place away from a computer. So it had to rely heavily on a found footage style with security cams to pull it off. All in all, the movie was successful with its idea. It wasn’t perfect, as new ideas that try experimental things often are. But even if it failed miserably, the idea was a compelling one and could have gone wrong in a million different ways. The fact that it didn’t should be commended.
Missing is now streaming on Netflix.
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