June Allen鈥檚 mother has vanished during a romantic vacation with her boyfriend to Colombia when starts gaining steam. The FBI are supposedly on it, with one special agent telling June: 鈥淭he best thing you can do is wait by the phone.鈥� Wait by the phone? You don鈥檛 know June Allen, buddy.
Audiences get a ringside seat to 18-year-old June鈥檚 quick mind and even quicker fingers as the teenager uses all the modern tools at her disposal to solve the mystery in this superbly constructed and satisfying thriller from the director-writer team of Will Merrick and Nick Johnson.
It's true that June (鈥淎 Wrinkle in Time鈥� star Storm Reid) is mostly by the phone in her Los Angeles home but she鈥檚 not waiting: When mom doesn鈥檛 return as expected, June checks her reservations, uses Google street view to inspect the Colombian hotel and notices it has security cameras installed. She then calls the front desk, and, using a Spanish translating software, finds out that the security tape gets overwritten every 48 hours.
So June contacts the FBI 鈥� making sure to find and inspect the agent鈥檚 online credentials 鈥� but also locating and hiring a local Colombian 鈥� thank you Venmo 鈥� to grab the video and be her eyes and ears on the ground via that nation's equivalent of TaskRabbit. She then sifts through credit card receipts, iPhone location services, live tourist cameras and tons of online sleuthing to get closer to the truth, much better than a flood of salacious online news that sometimes invades June's screen.
鈥淢issing,鈥� building off the related film 鈥淪earching鈥� from 2018, manages to make a film about small screens feel electric on a big one. June stands shoulder to shoulder with all other civilians thrust into being world-class detectives, like Veronica Mars or Jessica Fletcher. It's just the tools that have changed, and a noticeable lack of shoe leather that's needed. June shows a real aptitude for guessing passwords and her cut-and-paste game is ferocious.
At one point we see June's laptop screen 鈥� a mess of open Sticky Notes, Zillow listings, phone reverse look-ups, blocked Twitter tabs, MapQuest directions and new bookmarked contacts 鈥� and realize that what we're looking at is the 2023 equivalent of the so-called 鈥渕urder board,鈥� that trusted collage of random suspect photos tacked onto a cork board and connected by twine. 鈥淢颈蝉蝉颈苍驳鈥� doesn't need twine 鈥� it's a pure Gen-Z know-how flex.
Merrick and Johnson have so many twists and turns and reverses up their sleeve that you may feel you, too, may have something to do with the disappearance of June's mother (Nia Long, always a pleasure.) People have a tendency to arrive in June's frame of vision, then become suspects before eventually getting off the hook. But not all. Your attention will not lag, despite the fact that 80% of the film is watching small screens pop open and closed on June's laptop.
There's also a not-so-subtle lesson here about personal secrecy 鈥� or a lack thereof. June becomes a hacker, carefully testing passwords by knowing that users often repeat them across devices, and she accesses supposedly secure locations, like her mom's profile on a fictional dating app. She goes through text logs as easily as court documents, and when she can't figure out the password of something, she just hits the 鈥淔orgot Password鈥� button and a new one is sent to her. She even finds clues in secrets her mother has hidden for more than a decade. You might be forgiven if you go home after watching this movie and trigger two-factor authentication on all your stuff.
What's most fascinating about 鈥淢颈蝉蝉颈苍驳鈥� is that it's a teen who bails out her Gen X mom using technology that mom barely has a handle on. We are so often dismissive of young adults 鈥� from their addiction to TikTok dances to supposedly being unreliable 鈥� but you'll want no one but June Allen looking out for you when you go missing. Sherlock Holmes would still be stuck waiting for a flight out of LAX.
鈥淢issing,鈥� a Sony Pictures release exclusively in theaters Jan. 20, is rated PG-13 for 鈥渟ome strong violence, language, teen drinking and thematic material.鈥� Running time: 111 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
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MPAA Definition of PG-13: Parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.
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Mark Kennedy, The Associated Press
