Missing

Synopsis: 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.

Review:

The movie opens with a video being watched on a computer screen of a daughter and her father and her mother enters, and the video is being edited the end with the father and daughter together. The father played by Tim Griffin in the video died of a brain tumor shortly after the video was shot. We move forward in time years later with that little girl, June who is played by Storm Reid and she is planning a week of house parties. June’s mother Grace is played by Nia Long and her boyfriend Kevin is played by Ken Leung and they are heading to Columbia on that vacation which is the inciting incident for the film and the house parties. The framing device for this film is June’s laptop screen, where we are seeing her Facetiming with her mother, texting with friends and the ring door video when someone comes to the door in the opening scenes. June leaves Facetime application open on her desktop, so we constantly see June’s face and her living room and front door. Her mother transfers $350 into her bank account, and this is the funding for the week of parties and we have a montage of partying ending with a party on father’s day where June is sad, drinks too much and throws up. Then she wakes up at 11am with a heck of a hangover to her devices notifications go off to remind her to pick up her mother and Ken from the airport. She eventually hires a person from Task Rabbit to clean her destroyed house from the previous night and week of parties, and heads to the airport.

June heads to the airport and sets her phone up to capture her holding up a sign that will embarrass / make her mother laugh, a clever way to get us to see what’s going on at the airport via her iPhone. After a long time she realizes her mother and Kevin don’t show up. Once this realization happens June heads home, calls the hotel that her mother and Kevin were staying at on vacation and stumbles thru her lack of spanish and uses Google translate to grab phrases and translating, and inputting some responses in English and reads the Spanish translations to the front desk person. June pieces together that there are security camera footage, and it overwrites on a pattern and any footage of her mother and Kevin will be gone in 12 hours. June starts to communicate with the FBI and specifically agent Elijah Park played by Daniel Henney and the gets a lot of bureaucracy talk and officially the US can’t investigate within a sovereign nation.

The next phase of this movie is a lot of hacking Kevin’s accounts, where we find out that he has been in jail as a con artist, June eventually thinks of hiring a gig worker and starts at Task Rabbit, but it isn’t available in Columbia and finds another service and eventually hires Javi played by Joaquim de Almeida. One of the Kevin’s accounts that June has hacked into was his Google account and she eventually looks at his location data, and in Columbia there is no data but there was a stand out location a few hours away from his home. June eventually does an address reverse lookup for a phone number, and talks to a man who claims that he is Jimmy that is a Christian rehabilitation center for ex-convicts. June continues to dig deeper and is feeding information to Agent Park and he is constantly warning her that they won’t be able to use any of this information because she has hacked these accounts including her mother’s dating application, where she sees the messages with Kevin, texts and videos. Eventually she sees a video where Kevin eludes to his past, and his mother’s response acknowledging that she knows his secret and she has a secret to share herself.

At this point feels like we are hitting a dead end, Javi doesn’t get the footage, but Agent Park gets a video from a band of criminals of a kidnapping of Kevin and Grace. June dives back into Kevin’s emails and finds two things an email from a woman that looks similar to Grace, and a delivery of security package with a service that has an account to see the cameras. Kevin responds to the email of the woman that this is great see you soon, and eventually June finds her Instagram account where she is an influencer and actor but works at a local restaurant. This leads to June calling the business and eventually learns that she hasn’t been at work all week and didn’t call in. This leads her to reevaluate everything, and she looks back at the texts from Kevin and her mom’s face isn’t really in focus in any photo, and one of the texts is a live image that she activates and we see that the woman is actually this actor not her mother Grace. June eventually gets access to the security company’s service and sees the This leads to Kevin being found near the border and eventually him being killed in the police action live on television.

After all that the Jimmy the “church guy” that June tracked Kevin to via his Google timeline in the second act, calls her phone after she was able to log into the security website. The Ring starts to go off at the front door and it’s Jimmy, she opens the door and it is June’s father James played by Tim Griffin. June is them abducted and taken to the house where the security cameras are installed and we find Grace in the shed. Grace and June end up in the same room, James shoots Grace and June realizes the room is one of the rooms that is on her screen at home. She uses Siri on her phone at home next too her laptop to call 911, and then the cops arrive at this home. The movie ends with a few months passing and we see June watching their story on a true crime show called Unfiction at college and Facetiming her mom who just became friends with Javi.