When her mother disappears while on vacation in Colombia with her new boyfriend, June’s search for answers is hindered by international red tape. Stuck thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, June creatively uses all the latest technology at her fingertips to try and find her before it’s too late. But as she digs deeper, her digital sleuthing raises more questions than answers... and when June unravels secrets about her mom, she discovers that she never really knew her at all.
20 Apr Missing (2023)
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This is a great idea, presenting an entire long form film through computer/phone screens. There’s a bit of a cheat at the end where we are shifted among surveillance cameras where the focus follows the action.
I’ve seen a few experiments along these lines, including the similar ’Searching.’ An appeal to audiences is that we are seeing a long form narrative from screens that we use for short form and messaging. All of us spend time in this mode, so the novelty is obvious and slightly engaging.
I am coming at this from the perspective of mystery traditions in film. A common form has the filmmaker in invisible ghost mode showing us limited parts of reality that obscure key facts and events for us to try to fill in as well go. The detective is our on-screen avatar in this, with in the movie and trying to discover it.
Here we have something like a movie within a movie, consisting of records that can be assembled by our detective, replaying reality to make sense of the baseline film narrative. I find that elegant and attractive, until we cheat and start seeing on-going action through the computer.
Posted in 2024
Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
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