Missing (2023)

Missing arrives as a screenlife thriller in which June Allen, played by Storm Reid, conducts an entire investigation from a laptop, a phone, and the accumulated debris of her mother's digital life. The gimmick is executed with real craft; every cursor twitch and browser tab was rebuilt in vector graphics, and the effect lands as a plausible grammar for adolescent detective work. Miss Reid carries the film with composure, flanked by a multiethnic ensemble that includes Nia Long, Joaquim de Almeida, Ken Leung, and Daniel Henney. Their presence is unfussy and unremarked. Nobody pauses to congratulate the production for it.

The emotional engine is a mother-daughter pair, and the daughter does the driving. That arrangement supplies a quiet, structural progressivism, though the film has little interest in building an argument from it. Colombia functions as backdrop and logistical obstacle, not as a thesis about anything. Race is never a subject of commentary. The central villain turns out to be a scammer and a stalker, and his schemes read as intimate betrayal, not as an indictment of a system. There is no class critique hiding in the con.

Where the film earns its restraint is in what it declines to do. It shows a teenager outthinking bureaucracies and algorithms, and it lets that speak without a lecture attached. The faint thematic breeze concerns online misinformation and the resourcefulness of a generation raised on screens, and even this arrives through plot mechanics instead of sermonizing. It is a genre picture that trusts its audience, which in this climate feels almost quaint. The result is a competent, slightly hollow entertainment, culturally literate but never preachy, and content to be a thriller.