What’s it about?

When her mother disappears while on vacation in Colombia with her new boyfriend, a young woman uses the technology at her fingertips to try and find her before it’s too late.

What’d we think?

Screenlife is a genre I did not realise had a name until I started to notice an influx of films using this storytelling device (pun intended). In short, it’s a visual storytelling technique where the entirety of the film takes place on a computer screen, a tablet or a phone. While the main protagonist is always presented in a FaceTime window in the corner of the screen, we are also watching the characters navigate the web to find information, type messages and watch videos. It doesn’t sound thrilling — it usually isn’t, but Missing is a more compelling version of this genre.

It serves as a spiritual sequel to Searching (2018) and follows June (Storm Reid), who seeks to find her mother, Grace (Nia Long), after she disappears during a holiday in Columbia with her new boyfriend. We follow June’s sleuthing as she tries to put the pieces together to find her missing mother.

The movie is often tongue-in-cheek in the way it portrays older generations’ lack of security with their passwords — June effortlessly breaks into emails to find new information. Storm Reid had the hard task of making the movie feel human and relatable and I thought she did a good job. I had a slight smirk at the ridiculousness of the intense score blaring while the mouse cursor would hover over the What’sApp ‘download’ button.

It’s silly but the movie mostly works. It’s also a timely reminder to update all my passwords to 2FA.