Shinzô Katayama’s gritty Japanese thriller centers on a plucky 15-year-old trying to find her missing father after a wanted fugitive—a cold-blooded killer—assumes his identity.
The story begins when Kaede (Aoi Itô), a serious-looking girl, bails out her father when he attempts to leave an Osaka grocery store without paying. The store manager lets Santoshi (Jirô Satô) go, but it’s clear that the lumbering widower has issues. Kaede explains that her father, an unemployed ping-pong parlor proprietor, "isn't all there." The next day, she checks his room to find that he has disappeared, so she sets out to find him.
Since Kaede has no other relatives in town, a teacher and a middle school admirer help her hand out fliers. Then she gets a text from Santoshi telling her he's fine and not to look for him. Later that day, she spots a wanted poster featuring the face of a laborer she had run into while retracing Santoshi's steps. He told her his name was Santoshi Harada—the same as her father—but he's actually Terumi Yamauchi (The World of Kanako's Hiroya Shimizu), a fugitive wanted for homicide. Since there's a substantial reward for Terumi’s capture, Kaede becomes convinced that Santoshi left home to claim it.
By duplicating his train commute, Kaede discovers where Terumi lives and plans to confront him, even as her teacher and a nun try to convince her that Santoshi has abandoned her. As she makes like a junior detective, Kaede puts herself in harm's way, but she also finds proof that she's on the right track. If she's taking a risk, she turns out to be tougher than she looks.
Katayama then backs up three months to introduce Terumi as an itinerant young man looking for a place to stay. After a kindly, if a kinky old man puts him up for the night—Terumi has an obsession with white socks—he pays his host back in the most ungrateful manner, after which the director backtracks 13 months to Santoshi's life with Kaede's late mother, who had ALS. A chance meeting with Terumi offers a solution to his problems while linking the two in an ethically dubious way.
By the end, father and daughter will reconnect, but only one will enjoy a relatively happy ending. Absorbing and well-acted throughout, Missing is nonetheless a grim story that features protracted scenes of violence—choking, stabbing, and hanging—mostly inflicted against women. The twist is that they were seeking the sweet relief of death, except Terumi is hardly a trained professional like Dr. Kervorkian. He acts out of malice and greed rather than sympathy and concern.
Director and co-writer Shinzô Katayama served as Bong Joon-ho’s assistant on 2009's Mother, and his second feature, after 2018's Siblings of the Cape, has the feel of a slow-burn Bong thriller combined with the deadpan weirdness of a Kiyoshi Kurosawa murder mystery. If it doesn't quite hit those heights, Katayama remains a director to watch.
What kind of film series would this narrative fit in?
Missing would fit in a film series about contemporary Japanese cinema, particularly thrillers and murder mysteries.
What kind of film collection would this title be suitable for?
Missing would be suitable for Japanese cinema, crime, mystery, and thriller collections in public libraries.