News

Aneesh Chaganty's "Searching," was a truly inventive thriller, depicting a father's search for his missing daughter as played out entirely in the digital space. In the 2018 film, John Cho's David Kim doggedly tracks down his missing daughter Margot (Michelle La) in an intense scramble across websites, phone videos, security cameras, and virtual desktops. The Chaganty-helmed project was a minor hit, and a messier but just as thrilling anthology sequel, "Missing," arrived earlier this year.

Directed by "Searching" editors Will Merrick and Nick Johnson, "Missing," carries on the central conceit of someone desperately looking for a lost relative via digital means. In the film, Storm Reid's June searches for her missing mother (Nia Long) who disappears on a trip to Colombia. And just as some viewers noticed a whole alien invasion narrative playing out as an easter egg in "Searching," "Missing" appears to be telling a whole superhero origin story in secret.

Sony Pictures' "Missing", the new thriller written and directed by Will Merrick and Nick Johnson, is a standalone sequel to "Searching" (2018), starring Storm Reid ("Euphoria"), Joaquim de Almeida, Ken Leung, Amy Landecker, Daniel Henney and Nia Long, now playing in theaters before streaming on Netflix:

"...teenager 'June Allen' tries to find her missing mother after she disappears on vacation in Colombia with her new boyfriend..."

Click the images to enlarge...

Addictive Netflix thriller You is finally back. And in Season 4, Charlotte Ritchie gets the unenviable honour of playing the latest obsession of creepy-yet-handsome, ‘I just can’t help falling in love with (and then probably killing) you’ Joe, aka Penn Badgley.

If you’re new to You, it’s the story of bookshop manager Joe Goldberg, who has a pathological tendency to develop dangerous infatuations with women, which usually end in lots of bloodshed and/or a prolonged stay in a plexiglass book vault. Most recently, he’s had a son, whom he was forced to abandon when escaping to a new life across the Atlantic after the nail-biting, catastrophic Series 3 finale.

These days, Joe goes by Professor Jonathan Moore, and is living it up in London town. Charlotte Ritchie’s character is savvy ice-queen and art gallery director Kate, part of a group of wealthy and privileged young Brits Joe gets tangled up with.

The title of "Missing" pretty much sums it up: this is the story of a missing person, and the family member who puts her all into finding out what happened. The thriller follows Storm Reid's June, a high schooler whose mother goes missing during a Colombian vacation with her boyfriend. Once June realizes that something has gone terribly wrong, she does as any screen-obsessed, digital-age dweller would: harnesses the power of the Internet to track her mother down. And almost entirely through the lens of her various devices, the audience watches it happen.

"Missing" is the latest in a growing collection of screenlife movies, and the second from this particular filmmaking team headed up by Aneesh Chaganty. The John Cho thriller "Searching" came first, following a father's twisty tale of solving his daughter's murder. This time around, Chaganty and co decided to flip the script by focusing on a...

[The following story contains mild spoilers for Missing.]

Missing directors Nick Johnson and Will Merrick are wunderkinds in the truest sense of the word.

The duo began their careers as co-editors on director Aneesh Chaganty and screenwriter Sev Ohanian’s Searching (2018) and Run (2020), before making the improbable leap to feature film directors on Missing, the spiritual follow-up to the aforementioned films. With screenlife films like Searching and Missing, post-production requires significantly more time than principal photography does, so as editors, Johnson and Merrick already knew the ins and outs of making such unique tech-based thrillers.

All three films have formed a shared cinematic universe of sorts as Missing subtly references the fictional true crimes of the prior films, and in Run’s case, the plot was moved forward courtesy of a news ticker that alluded to Sarah Paulson’s character escaping the Corrections Center that she wound up in at the end of Run.

“We found interesting places to hide [references] in the movie,...

Spoiler Alert: This story contains major spoilers for the ending of “Missing,” currently playing in theaters.

“Missing,” the latest release from Sony Pictures Entertainment, is told entirely through computer screens and smartphones.

Storm Reid is June, a daughter using modern technology to track down her mom, played by Nia Long, who has gone missing thousands of miles away in Colombia.

Nicholas Johnson and Will Merrick’s follow-up to the 2018 thriller “Searching” posed a challenge for editors Austin Keeling and Arielle Zakowsk about how to tell the story and create tension as June races against the clock to find her mother.

Says Keeling, “Arielle and I took screenshots on our computers and put together the whole movie as a temp version. We were able to play around through the editing process and choose how to cover June’s laptop, how to tell it in the most effective way.”

While FaceTime, Ring...

Stars: Storm Reid, Joaquim de Almeida, Ken Leung, Amy Landecker, Daniel Henney, Nia Long | Written and Directed by Nicholas D. Johnson, Will Merrick

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. However, as she digs ever deeper, her digital sleuthing soon raises more questions than answers.

The concept of movies told entirely through a computer or phone screen isn’t new, as we’ve been graced with films such as Unfriended and Host, but the best of the bunch easily has to be Aneesh Chaganty‘s Searching, which told the story of a father who must do everything he can to search for clues as to...

Where found footage was once a revolutionary format for the digital age, our constantly rotating world is now looking to the internet for its innovation. The "screenlife" subgenre has mostly been seen through the lens of horror movies like "Unfriended," "Host," and "The Den." But it was director Aneesh Chaganty's "Searching" where it felt like I was watching something new being born. In screenlife, computers are not only used for the narrative sake of an investigative thriller, but to tell us more about the characters within. An invisible camera guides the eyes of an audience to where it needs them to be, utilizing the conventional methods of filmmaking for a new kind of cinematic language.

"Searching" feels extra special when the people watching it within its specific era are able to understand the intricacies of going onto a certain website, or opening up an app. I've really started to...

While this past weekend at the box office was, once again, dominated by the likes of "Avatar: The Way of Water," "M3GAN," and "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish," Sony Pictures decided to enter the chat as well with a new thriller in the form of "Missing." It serves as a sequel of sorts to 2018's micro-budget hit "Searching" and, similarly, largely takes place on computer screens and other such devices. Despite the fact that it didn't top the charts (far from it), the thriller still did quite well for itself and, what's more, continued to prove a rather important point to the movie business at large.

"Missing," which was directed by Will Merrick and Nick Johnson, came in at number four over the weekend with 9.3 million. It beat projections, with estimates having it at around 8.5 million. Given that the movie was very minimally advertised and carried a production budget of just 7 million,...

This post contains spoilers for "Missing."

"Missing," the sequel to 2018's Screenlife movie "Searching," is in theaters now, and while this follow-up is perhaps not quite as electrifying as the first movie since the format has become a bit more familiar to audiences, it's still a wildly entertaining and twisty thrill ride that keeps the audience guessing and expands the scope of this franchise in fascinating ways. The filmmaking team behind the first movie have all returned for "Missing," albeit in a shuffled capacity. On "Searching," Aneesh Chaganty served as co-writer and director; Sev Ohanian was a co-writer and producer; Natalie Qasabian was a producer, and Will Merrick and Nick Johnson served as editors and "directors of screen photography," having generated every digital asset in the movie from scratch.

For "Missing," Chaganty and Ohanian have "story by" credit, Ohanian and Qasabian returned as producers, and Merrick and Johnson wrote the...

Back in 2018, Aneesh Chaganty’s “Screenlife” thriller Searching was a huge hit at the box office, grossing over 75 million worldwide against a reported 880,000 budget. This past weekend brought the theatrical release of Missing, a follow-up film from the same team.

Opening in 3,025 theaters across the United States over the weekend, Missing just scared up 9.3 million at the domestic box office, and it’s likely to have legs in the coming weeks.

The catch here is that Missing cost a lot more to make than Searching – the reported production budget is 7 million – but it’s well on its way to being profitable in theaters.

Storm Reid and Nia Long star in Missing, with the cast also including Joaquim de Almeida, Ken Leung, Amy Landecker, Daniel Henney, Megan Suri and Tim Griffin.

In the brand new Searching sequel Missing, said to be a “thrilling roller-coaster mystery that makes you wonder how well...