Here's one of the more unexpected arrivals at this year's early box office: Missing, a spin-off of the 2018 mystery-thriller Searching, which starred John Cho as a single father who desperately investigates the disappearance of his teenage daughter. Though not a direct sequel, Missing does occur within the same "universe" as the original film, kicking things off with a cold open that misdirects the audience into believing they are seeing a recreation of events from the original film, only to reveal that the protagonist is actually watching an episode of a Netflix true-crime drama based upon those events. Also, like its predecessor, Missing is an example of a still emergent genre of "screenlife" movies, a term coined by none other than the film's producer Timur Bekmambetov.
So-called "screenlife" movies can be understood as a format of immersive cinema that sprouted off from the explosion in popularity of "found footage" horror films and thrillers that began in earnest between 2007 and 2008. Except whereas found footage movies adopt the faux-documentary conceit of taking place almost entirely from the perspective of digital cameras native to the environments in which events take place, screenlife movies take on a different vantage of technological subjectivity by framing narratives entirely within the two-dimensional space of computer screens. Bekmambetov, a seasoned veteran of genre cinema who first burst onto the international scene with the 2004 cult hit Night Watch, has consciously position himself as the pioneer of a genre for which he coined the name. He not only produced Searching, but also the 2014 low-budget hit Unfriended, its much less successful sequel, and his own political thriller Profile, the latter two both being released in the same year as Searching.
What the future holds in terms of the economic prospects of Bekmambetov's career ambitions is anyone's guess. (As far as the term "screenlife," most academics and journalists would seem to prefer "computer screen" movies, whereas I'm inclined to my own pet category that combines "screenlife" and "found footage" under the umbrella of what I call "tech-subjective.") Like Unfriended, the original Searching was an incredible success, raking in nearly $76 million against a budget less than a million. Though not necessarily some kind of blockbuster, Missing is stepping up to the plate with a substantially higher budget and a decidedly inert publicity campaign relying heavily on the residual enthusiasm for an only tangentially related movie that came out four years ago, and which does not seem to have accounted for the post-COVID malaise that's currently choking out the chain multiplexes. Horror and thriller movies aren't taking nearly the same beating as many mid- and low-budget dramas, of course; but it remains to be said that the present condition of algorithmic digital advertising models is woefully inadequate in terms of grabbing the attention of mass audiences in the same way as T.V. spots and theatrical trailers. The gravity of the motion picture industry is accelerating towards a marketplace almost exclusively oriented around streaming and video-on-demand. And while that may not seem like such a dire situation for a movie that is literally designed to look like it takes place on a laptop, as with its predecessor, Missing is in fact, counter-intuitively, a spectacle that is almost anachronistically dependent upon the disjuncture between the microcosm of digital life and the imposing size of the big screen. It may not be Avatar, but it is nonetheless a visual effects-heavy experience that, like any other visual effects-heavy experience, loses something in the translation from cinema to living room to laptop. It just so happens that what it stands to lose is not the grandiosity of mech-suits and space whales, but the more ironic reframing of computer screens, browser windows, and video chat feeds as a still rather novel medium for telling stories and generating high anxiety.
As with its predecessor, the plot of Missing is rather baseline and self-explanatory; except that the writers of Searching, Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian, now acting as producers of this spin-off, have reversed the roles. Whereas the first film was about a single parent investigating the disappearance of their daughter, Missing stars Storm Reid as June, a teenage girl investigating the disappearance of her single mother, played by Nia Long, who vanishes while on vacation with her new boyfriend. The filmmakers have also flipped the thematic text this time around. Instead of being concerned with a parent confronting their emotional estrangement from their child, Missing confronts a young person's growing realization of how they failed to appreciate their parent.
Missing is not the sort of a movie that you go into banking on transcendent performances or plausible writing. Though certainly not technically unambitious, or technically unsuccessful for that matter, the main selling point here, as with Searching, is that you get a decently-acted, effectively belief-suspending, twist-and-turn caper to rouse you up on a boring night out that mainly makes you go, "That was a lot better than it had any right to be. That's money well spent." Those who prefer their mysteries to be a tad more grounded, or their thrillers to be on the more psychological side, will probably find less here to stoke their enthusiasm. By the very nature of its format, the screenlife movie just isn't that type to lend itself to subtlety or cerebral tension, at least at first glance.
But as with much of the found footage cycle from which it was birthed, and for which Searching served as an aesthetic nadir, writing off Missing for its apparent gimmickry undersells the radically cinematic qualities that make it work so well. The sad truth is that both films are hampered by the reality that, whereas there have been plenty of "B" movie gimmicks throughout film history that failed to meaningfully predict significant changes in spectatorship and society, the entire premise of the computer screen movie inevitably underscores the decline of cinematic culture and the hegemonic dominance of screen life. The cinema is rapidly facing a crisis of identity, in which it seems inevitable that, merely in order to survive, it needs to move ever more quickly in the direction of theme park attraction, three dimensions and rumbling seats. Even the reference to streaming shows in Missing, which is all the more cleverly used to bookend the narrative, portends the creators' acknowledgment of the increasing inaccessibility of not only cinematic culture, but also the very narrative and visual language of feature films themselves, to a society that, like Reid's protagonist, is already living through life in hyper-mediated, self-reflective terms. Whereas both cinema and television ascended as mediums in contexts in which channels of communication were so much more focal, and demanded so little of the spectator, characters like June and their real-life analogues have been born into the age of constant screen access and dependence, of intensive media saturation and decentralization of her focus, and of the siren-like demand to inhabit and become a participant in that spectacle, rather than simply observing it in the entertaining abstract.
One of the first sticking points of incredulity in both Searching and Missing is that its protagonists spend so much time with their FaceTime app open, which may not be precisely inaccurate to how certain "Type A" personalities navigate their personal communications and various browser windows, but doesn't seem particularly relevant to how most people spend most of their time using their computers. Nonetheless, the omnipresence of June's face in her own mediated life, and the fact that we are always only looking at a reflection of her, not the person herself, is itself an effective and trenchant metaphor. That the way this shot is blocked and framed within a window and computer screen is so aesthetically inconspicuous, so apparently discursive of modernist notions of evocative cinematography, additionally points up the unacknowledged extent to which screen life is not merely competing with the cinema, but actively undermining some of its most foundational artistic values. Our cinema is not dying just because our attentions are distracted, or because the theatrical experience has been systematically de-professionalized, becoming less enjoyable as a result. Our cinema is dying because the new media is literally mutilating our collective ability to understand its formal language. There's a reason that the most popular movie content on social media is not video essays, but movie reactions - the spectacle of watching others watching movies.
Missing, while quite entertaining, is not quite on the same level as Searching. Part of the reason for this, I am inclined to feel, is merely a matter of novelty. This is a very similar story done in a very similar way to something that I have already seen. And the extent to which the narrative of Missing builds upon its predecessor is only in the direction of more excessive convolutions and twists. But there's also a decidedly formal lacking to the film. Though Chaganty and Ohanian conceived of the story for Missing, the film is written and directed by Nick Johnson and Will Merrick, who served as editors on the previous film, and are now making their managerial debut. And what Johnson and Merrick end up bringing to the table in terms of a vision is overly technical in nature, their instincts too conventionally cinematic. The height of emotional nuance and tension in Searching was never achieved in those moments when we were seeing star John Cho's face or hearing his voice. It was precisely in those moments when Chaganty pointed the cinematic eye only at a faceless screen, with only the compressed noises of clicks and prompts and notifications, inviting us to perceive the narrative through the protagonist's perspective, and to infer his emotional state through the power of suggestion and our own ability to relate to such mundane and familiar technology in a heightened generic context. Searching proved an aesthetically radical masterpiece of the commercial thriller not just in its twists and turns, but in the incredible suspense of minute, compulsive reaction, where simply the "ping" of a text receipt puts us on edge, silently dreading but demanding that the character respond to it quickly in much the same way that we might recoil at them failing to check behind a blind-spot, or to perceive some assailant lurking in the shadows. (As it turns out, Chaganty and Ohanian's attempts at a more conventionally cinematic thriller, the Hulu original Run, displayed no comparable ingenuity or brilliance.) With Missing, Johnson and Merrick foreground Reid's close-ups to an emotional and tonal detriment, and also flex their editing background too much, as if we can feel them cheating around the novel demands of the screen life format. Missing is certainly a fun movie, but it trails significantly behind its predecessor in terms of its recognizing and capitalizing upon the unique potential for creating a sense of emotional subjectivity interred with the cold edifice of the computer screen.
This is not to say that Johnson and Merrick's vision is totally without its own technical cleverness, and even compromised brilliance. They learn enough lessons from Chaganty in order to achieve rare moments of subjective impact. And even when they go too far in a conventionally cinematic direction, they are apt to achieve something that is just plain cool on its own. The most obvious example is when a sudden, unnerving revelation to Reid about her mother's past results in the windows of the computer screen seeming to grow in distance from each other and the background, suggesting three-dimensional depth. This is a rather obvious, but nonetheless amusing allusion to Hitchcock's iconic and oft-imitated "Vertigo shot," in which the camera would simultaneously track forwards while the focal length of the camera lens was shortened, creating a similarly-framed but nonetheless wider shot with a suddenly disoriented and exaggerated sense of distance. Johnson and Merrick, of course, are achieving this effect entirely through visual effects. But in a film that, to anyone with some editing experience especially, feels just a little too stitched together and obvious in its construction, it is at least playful.
Their exploitation of dietetically limited camera perspectives, as well as limitations in terms of resolution in the image, also proves to have some quite compelling effects. Especially by the film's climax, compelled by necessity to create multiple shots in editing from a single vantage on a scene (both to provide visual variety as well as to cheat coverage) they also make clever use of reflections to be able to capture the performance of an actor whose back is turned to the camera. But in "pushing in" on a shot with a set resolution, what often results is a very blocky, artifact-laden image in which the square pixels of the shot become enlarged, providing only the most suggestive impressions of an actor's performance. This uncanny but no less intriguing effect is compounded by limited lighting, which can at once enhance our sense of the grittiness and morbidity of a scenario, while also being quite psychologically suggestive because of all that which we can not perceive. An exceptionally good shot in this regard is when a villainous character walks away from a security camera into the night, with only very limited source lighting at his back, ending with only the most granular impression of him in the murky darkness as we see the pixels undulate and hear the sound effect of a shovel being plunged into the soil, the digging of a grave.
At a time when so much of not only tentpole cinematic spectacle, but also videography in general, is premised on images of such high resolution and neutral fidelity to realism that it only achieves the most flat, smooth, and muted outcomes, what occurs in Missing, as with Searching, is not merely entertaining or interesting, but genuinely challenging and even avant garde. These are the sorts of techniques that you usually don't see anywhere except in the most alienated corridors of experimental filmmaking, and yet here they are, executed with such confident craftsmanship in a Saturday night popcorn thriller. That the shot compositions themselves are so detached from even the barest conventions of modern, picturesque cinematography all the more accentuates the fact that, while the story might be meat-and-potatoes, what we are experiencing is genuinely original, a true and remarkable synthesis; the pixelated flesh of new media stretched over the canvas of a dying cinema.
Comments
Post a Comment