Film Review

Missing (2023)

A teenage girl uses all the resources of the internet to search for her missing mother

Surprisingly, it’s been less than a decade since “screenlife” movies — films told entirely through the content of computer and device screens — truly went mainstream. While there were precursors, like Megan is Missing (2011), it was Unfriended (2014) where this particular twist on the found-footage style scored its first major hit.

Unfriended was soon followed by the even more successful Searching (2018), and now some of the team behind that production have delivered a follow-up in Missing — a sequel only in the loosest sense of the word. Its writer-directors, Nick Johnson and Will Merrick, worked as editors on the earlier film.

Screenlife as a sub-genre may not last long; this style of filmmaking, which essentially uses the internet as the location for a drama to play out (rather than being about the internet as a subject) will, ironically, lose its distinctiveness as more and more of our real lives are encoded in digital images.