Getting this right once was difficult twice was almost entirely improbable, but thrice, well, surely there's just no way in hell they can pull it off a third time? Right? Right?! The budget of this film is presumably microscopic enough that chances are high for us to get a third instalment in this loosely connected series (presumably with a new duo or two along for the ride and presumably called "looking" and featuring two missing people looking for each other) but I hope not. And, if nothing else, it will probably be studied by film students for years to come. But this film really shouldn't work anywhere near as well as it does, and it will almost definitely go down as one of the better thrillers you'll see this year. And June starts off the film as such a stereotypically angry, angsty teenager that it takes a while to warm up to her. Some of those twists stretch credulity just a bit too far. Missing is not a perfect film by any means. It's never boring, and it's never even remotely confusing either, as the way the information is laid out on screen organically unspools the mystery, piece by bloody piece, with absolute clarity. Switching between different windows on a PC monitor is not traditionally the stuff of high-octane thrills, nor are FaceTime conversations and text chains, but the sheer virtuosity of how each element interacts with one another makes for a breathless and genuinely exciting thrill ride. Forget the plot Missing is very much about a pair (or two pairs) of editors strutting their stuff.Īnd boy, do they strut it. Regardless, though, Johnson and Merrick, who both make their feature film writing and directing debut here, have clearly chosen the perfect vehicle with which to expand their repertoire. Ironically, though, they aren't credited as editors on Missing, as they've ceded those duties to yet another duo, Austin Keeling and Arielle Zakowski. The duo is also responsible for the script, which is based on a story by the creative team behind Searching, Sev Ohanian and Aneesh Chaganty. Johnson and Will Merrick, the editors of Searching actually direct the film. The performances are solid, the characters are well enough defined, and the plot is super-duper twisty (in fact, just a wee bit too super-duper twisty – the film could have lost ten to fifteen minutes and a couple of twists to make things just that much tighter), but Missing is really just a master class in editing, which is really not surprising since Nicholas D. What this does mean, though, is that this is a film where the editing is literally everything. By weakening the concept, we don't need to worry about the reality of someone's webcam being on 24/7, and we certainly don't have to sit through hours of footage just to get to the good bits (again, see Paranormal Activity) or try to hold our lunches down from shaky-cam overexposure. Yes, all the action is shown through text messages and "unprofessionally" recorded video, but it never actually comes across like we're supposed to think we're watching the reassembled footage of something so much as we're watching a more conventional film that happens to be played out mostly on a teenage girl's computer. It helps, of course, that it isn't actually "found footage". Though it is certainly less purposeful than the first go around – Searching used it to comment about how much of our lives are lived online Missing just uses it as a device – it actually hasn't totally worn out its welcome. Even that silly gimmick has once again bucked the trend. Imagine my surprise to find that Missing, though not quite as good or as sharp as its predecessor, is actually really pretty damn good and despite being, like, exactly the same movie but with a slight shift in perspective (this time, the parent goes missing!), doesn't feel anywhere near as stale as it ought to. No surprise, then, that I was less than thrilled when I learned they were making a "standalone" sequel to Searching, called, brilliantly, Missing. Yeah, Searching was great, and its "found footage" concept totally worked for it, but trying to replicate its success would be like Paranormal Activity all over again: super effective original, redundant and increasingly rubbish sequels. The sort of thing you can't really hope to have happen more than once. It was, basically, something of a small miracle.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |