Missing

Moderately speaking, Gnomes put Mike Storch on the map when it came to auteur recognition. Missing is another righteous path confirming his style: the subtle and often very cold emotional thriller. Yet the latter is not Mike’s doing as much as it was in Gnomes, but rather Andres De La Hoz’s. Writing as a solitary credit for the first time retrospectively serves Missing well, bypassing comparisons to a certain French sadistic thief. That said, it would be difficult to observe that relationship: Missing is a very different film to Satanik. How different it is from Gnomes is debatable. True this lacks undersized goblins wandering the woodland, but the tension and the direction is all intact. Depending on how much you enjoyed Gnomes then, Missing is an absorbing successor.

The short sticks closely to its themes of formal brutality and uncertain intention by playing up the subtleties in general. Storch often uses very minimalist scenery, but where it is used he has fun with some sharp imagery, often for over exaggerative uses that work to his advantage (the tools in particular help to give the film much needed eye candy and at the perfect moment fortify John’s description of torture). It’s unclear how much of the viciousness of the violence has been cut: that is probably Missing’s secret weapon. Subtlety comes at the price of candid visuals and it’s difficult to see how the film would have turned out without such delicacy with the sadism. That’s not to say Missing isn’t violent though. Far from it, we see enough to care what’s going on: torso mutilation, open penetrative flesh wounds and a facial hammering is enough to please any of our more bloodthirsty audience members. That’s a thumbs up to the director for making this choice, finding a positive balance between the extremes on offer. It could have been played either way. Admirably Missing admits flickers of both.

The narrative. The ball-court Mike had less to do with considering the pen was in Andres’ hand. But like Gnomes, this is where the film lets down. Where the high moments of drama exist, they do so mostly to tell the story rather than reveal anything about the construct of the twist here. As a result, when the twist does come it is a shock and rightly so, but this shock isn’t actually followed up with a conclusive ideal. We never find out why John did what he did, why his wife ‘wasn’t supposed to see it’ and most annoyingly he never find out why this victim seems to deserve torture so much that John is completely immune to mercy. The script seems to point out a lot of questions that are never actually answered. A lot of time at the beginning is spent describing the hurt the victim will inevitably go through, but with the underlying suggestion that he is asking for it or has done something to ask for it. This is one instance where the film explores John’s harsh brutality but never returns to interrogate it. The clearest and by far the most painful example of this is at the end come the fade-out for obvious reasons.

It’s hard to say how much of the film is carried by dialogue. Sadly in places it feels like Missing is a film that needed to be carried along by intense imagery, yet Storch struggles with the uneven and sometimes awkward wordplay. The script itself is measured to the point of patchiness, not to say there’s anything astronomically bad about it but then again there’s nothing noteworthy about it either. It often feels like Andres himself had a hard time discerning the dialogue of the characters, and this may be down to a rough back-story where two many potholes ruin the illusion of convincing character stimuli. Again, this is where the film fails. Curiously, the alternate storyline of actually looking for John was more engaging for me than the act of torture. This may be down to a deliberate lack of depth that served the plot strand incredibly well. Indeed, Andres lack of profundity could have gone almost completely ignored, if not for the weak crossover. The way the narrative intertwines is feeble and often disjointed. This is again apparent through Mike’s direction: he struggles to come to an agreeable balance, the editing devices so blunt that the audience never have time to connect with any one character. This is indefinitely regretful considering the genre.

Saviours come in all shapes and sizes to redeem such a crucial flaw. As said the enjoyable flashes of eye candy, often steadily flowing directorial merit and our blindness to the visceral gore on offer. Hats off to the voice actors who secured my attention away from the narrative editing. Justin relishes his role as a merciless kidnapper, who goes to great lengths to play irredeemable and arctic. Ironically he’s almost overshadowed by Super Chicken Girl’s anxious gentility as John’s wife. If only Gnomes had boasted such range, that film boasting more drama. But if Mike Storch is anxious to make any effort to move away from what he’s doing now then Missing hasn’t done him any favours. Stylistically it’s not dissimilar from Gnomes in any noticeable way, and yet again the director chooses a project that picks up on the human emotions behind the action, much like his collection of short films even before Gnomes. I’m actually inclined to compare this to Manhattan Folds, as that film equally had a lot in it but didn’t spend any time embellishing the subject matter. Missing shares this flaw, and that’s not to say it’s a bad film. More’s the pity that certain audience members may feel half empty by the credit crawl. Or depending on your level of optimism concerning Storch’s latest – half full.

I may have been quick to judge Missing by its flaws, but that’s only down to my knowledge of his other work and that Andres has written better dialogue than this. Having said that, Missing is always intriguing, delicately and admirably directed despite the pace of editing. It’s not a bad film by any count: Missing is probably the most striking humanely developed horror film. It’s a shame that in places it fails to enjoy a morally honest script and a commendable pace. Swift, swish and to the point without having to dumb down, Missing is a superior thriller. A shame then it’s old turf for Storch rather than new ground.