MISSING (2023)

MISSING is a thriller about an 18-year-old girl in Los Angeles who tries to find her missing mother who disappeared in Columbia while vacationing with her boyfriend on the day they were supposed to take a flight back home. MISSING is an intense, suspense-filled thriller with lots of twists and a positive moral worldview, but it has some strong foul language, dysfunctional family dynamics, perilous violence, and references in one scene to drug abuse, so extreme caution is advised.

Shot mostly on computers, smartphones and street cameras, the movie starts with June’s widowed mother, Grace, and her boyfriend, Kevin, leaving to catch the plane for Columbia. June and her mother are having problems with their relationship. So, Grace’s departure doesn’t receive the greatest attitude from June, who promises to pick up Grace and Kevin at the airport when they return.

However, when June goes to the airport to pick them up, they don’t show. Back home, she contacts the hotel and finds out that Grace and her boyfriend left all their luggage at the hotel. Using a translator on her computer, June talks to the manager and finds out she only has another 24 hours to get the hotel’s video security tapes before they’re erased automatically. June contacts the American Embassy in Bogota, but the FBI agent there isn’t sure they can get the hotel tapes in time because of red tape.

June hires a cheap tourist guide in Columbia named Javi to help track down her mother. He gets a lead from one of the hotel’s cleaning women. Javi is pretty helpful. He helps June track down a video of Grace and Kevin at a lover’s bridge, where Kevin appears to be proposing to Grace.

Everyone’s thrown for a loop, however, when the FBI finds a video near the bridge where Kevin and Grace seem to be kidnapped by a nondescript van. More twists follow, including one that makes everyone question the mother’s identity and motive.

MISSING is an intense, suspense-filled thriller with lots of twists. The movie is written and directed by the two editors and virtual cinematographers who did the 2018 movie SEARCHING, which has a similar concept. However, it’s not quite as good as that movie.

MISSING also has slightly more foul language in it. Despite that, it has a moral worldview. Eventually [SPOILER FOLLOWS], mother and daughter have to help one another fight off the movie’s real villain. Their fight for survival heals their broken relationship in MISSING.