Missing (2023)

Score: 3 / 5

Who knew that 2018's Searching would spawn a franchise? That might be a bit ambitious to say, as Missing isn't really a sequel so much as a sister film or continuation of similar ideas. It's another "screenlife" film, as the relatively new terminology allows us, an evolution of found footage films that really kicked off in the early-to-mid 2010s. For reference, Paranormal Activity 4 and The Den were probably (arguably) the first forays into depicting most of their action on computer screens, and they were released in 2012 and 2013, respectively. Timur Bekmambetov coined "screenlife" and has directed or produced the most work in the burgeoning subgenre. Other than Searching, notable titles include Profile, Unfriended, and Host. The format isn't for everyone -- though it thankfully doesn't induce as much motion sickness as found footage films usually do -- and I personally find the constant clicking and multiple windows and tabs and speedy (read: reckless) web searches to be more anxiety-inducing than others might.

Yet, as Bekmambetov and Aneesh Chaganty have demonstrated time and again, it is a fabulous medium for mystery-thrillers with an edge for real-life horrors. I imagine it's also an editing nightmare, but it's telling that the directors of Missing previously edited Searching. The film begins with a barrage of images that includes references to the previous film, revealing that they are in the same shared universe of mystery, false identities, digital crimes, and deadly real-world consequences. This time, our protagonist is a young woman named June (played by the always surprising Storm Reid) who, after a wild week of partying while her mother (Nia Long) is on vacation in Colombia, is forced to start looking for her mother, who she declares missing. She does so almost entirely on her laptop, using social media, search engines, her linked cell phone and email, and even surveillance footage. She communicates this way with her mother's best friend, her own friends, a hired hand in Colombia, and an FBI agent assigned to her case. It may stretch credulity, but it also functions to stretch our conception of how to use these technologies; at least, it does for me, though I expect Gen Z viewers might relate a bit better.

Too many details will spoil this film, as it works best to be taken at face value. The mystery itself is breathless, presented in frenetic style by the worried teenager on her computer as she navigates Snapchat and Venmo and FaceTime and TikTok and Ring and Taskrabbit and online dating profiles and hacking into her mother's boyfriend's (Ken Leung) e-mails. She's resourceful in intimidating ways -- a call to her mother's hotel with its Spanish-speaking clerk works because of June's quick-witted use of Google Translate -- and finds local help on the ground in the form of Javi (played by a heartwarming Joaquim de Almeida, who has a surprisingly emotional role to play). But the screenplay is also hopelessly convoluted, as far too many red herrings make the central mystery sometimes forgettable. That's always the problem with mysteries, right? They're either too simple or far too complex. Here, at least, it seems appropriate, because the internet makes everything far too complex.

But that also makes Missing a hell of a lot of fun. And, in some ways, an interesting look at the ways technology both helps and hurts us these days.

Old (2021)

 Score: 3.5 / 5

A nuclear family is en route to their exclusive beachside vacation. Rolling into the high-class resort is about as perfect as you can imagine it, even with two young children Maddox and Trent. Specialty cocktails are presented to parents Guy and Prisca (Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps), based apparently on their previously established food and nutrient preferences. The clientele are remarkably diverse, but all are living their best life between lounging at the spa and dining in full view of the tropical ocean bay. The resort manager -- who we briefly see acting hostile to a little brown boy -- tells the main family of a secluded beach, impossible to stumble across, they might especially like to explore. The drive there is chauffeured by M. Night Shyamalan, the mildly creepy director almost winking at us with an "I'm baaack" kind of delivery, literally reminding us that he's in control of assembling everything we're about to see.

That's just about the only metafictional element in Old, Shyamalan's latest directorial project, but it's effective for those of us who are generally willing to let him take us for a weird ride. The title is odd, and I wondered briefly if this would be some uncomfortable ageist horror, akin to what he gave us in The Visit in 2015. Although even that was more aesthetically and intellectually satisfying that some of his recent forays into more standard science fiction, but let's hope he's back on track now. His oeuvre certainly seems to be back here, namely in his thematic concern for the people he leaves on the secret beach, if not so much in plot or development.

Other people come to the beach, too, and I was initially worried about having to remember all the names. Once I realized the names don't matter, my anxiety waned: there's a doctor (Rufus Sewell) and his wife (Abbey Lee), his mother (Kathleen Chalfant) and young daughter. There's a third couple without children (Ken Leung and Nikki Amuka-Bird), and a quiet man with a bleeding nose already on the beach (Aaron Pierre). An ensemble cast is not unfamiliar territory for Shyamalan, but for arguably the first time in his career, he balances all of them well, often allowing his cinematographer and editor to isolate the characters in extreme close-ups with a blurry handheld camera, forcing us into one character's experience at a time. This is important to allow us access to the characters, but also to establish the rules of the film: everyone is on their own on this beach, despite the appearance that they're all in it together.

In what? In hell, perhaps. The relatively calm water grows more foamy and wavy as the day progresses, the sun climbs higher in a clear sky to bake the sand, and the cliff walls surrounding the secret beach seem to grow taller. The only way out is a cave-like crevice in the cliff face, but each time someone tries to pass through, they pass out and reawaken on the beach. As their flirtation with madness becomes concerning, a more pressing issue manifests: time is fleeting, and with each passing hour, they age roughly two years. By what we imagine is lunchtime, the young children have become young adults (played wonderfully by Alex Wolff, Thomasin McKenzie, and Eliza Scanlen) and the older ones begin to exhibit their own problems, from cancerous tumors to hearing and vision loss and even dementia. By the time a day will pass, half their lives will be gone; this means, too, that half of them will die by old age, if not by anything more insidious.

The screenplay, ambitious as it is with a truly terrifying conceit, never quite manages to do more than act like a kid in a sandbox, pushing people around to interact with each other for forced dramatic purpose. Most of the dialogue is heavily expository, filled with "what do we do now" and "this can't be happening" and even "remember when" stories about each other's medical or developmental history. Of course, it might be easy to read this all as thick or even lazy writing, but I think Shyamalan is dangerously close to realism here. After all, most of these folks are strangers, and it's not like they have a lot of time to discover, learn, test, fail, attempt again, and finally escape the accursed beach; they need to communicate bluntly and with lots of information, much as a group trying to solve an escape room. And with time relentlessly ticking, the consequences will be fatal.

Old is at its most chilling when exploring these consequences. It's not so much about solving the mystery of the beach -- which is why the final sequence (so often Shyamalan's most-debated scenes) is a bit of a letdown -- as it is about dealing with the reality of the beach's mystery. For this reason, the existential horror of the film should have been taken as its aesthetic. We get plenty of gruesome scares, from dead bodies washing up on the beach and young women falling from cliff faces to aging bones splintering and a madman slashing away at survivors with a knife. But for each moment of earned, unadulterated horror, the film slickly looks away, cutting out just as the violence occurs; some audiences will like this, as it focuses our attention on what we don't see and on the inner lives of the characters. I would argue that this technique undermines the thrilling and troubling elements of the story, minimizing our experience of the pain and agony that these characters are suffering. I want to see this same movie again, but with the potential body horror fully realized by a director willing to go all the way.

Shyamalan has certainly managed to make a career out of being unexpected, and often suggesting surrealism in otherwise realistic settings. But this movie is the first time I wanted so much more from him in execution: the evocative beach and dramatically fecund observations on aging would have paired well with full-on body horror as the characters broke down psychologically as well as physiologically. The closest we get to it, apart from the explicitly violent moments, are the terrifying moments when the camera hovers around one of the children's heads, hands, or feet. We see the reactions of people beholding the child that has suddenly aged, but we're kept in eerie suspense as we await the new makeup -- or new actor -- that will signify the child's new age. Effective as these moments are at highlighting the devastation of age, they feel unfulfilled as the film struggles to catch up with all the characters going through their own reckonings.

It's a wonderful reminder of the brilliance of this director, and I think Old will be remembered fondly alongside some of his earlier movies like The Village and Lady in the Water. As with those, its devotion to specifics is its downfall. When Shyamalan embraces ambiguity, his movies shine. With this one, he seems to know this, and taps into the meat of things just enough to keep the whole affair entertaining, provocative, and emotional. But then he pulls out, leaving those of us attuned to the genre feeling that a little bit more would have gone a long damn way. Then again, he always leaves us wanting more, and that's not a bad thing either.

Saw (series)

Saw (2004) ----- Score: 4.5 / 5

There's a cold, brutal brilliance to this movie that I will never shake. It's utterly original (if perhaps loosely inspired by Se7en) and fiercely conceived, wound tight as a knot of barbed wire, in which every scene is connected and every beat suggestive of potential (and potent) psychological horrors. The pale gloom of fluorescent lights and backgrounds awash in green and blue create an atmosphere as grimy and unpleasant as the sets and dressing, littered with debris, sharp angles, and lots of spiky metal. Dismal, violent, and wickedly intelligent, the film torments us along with its characters even as we are made to begrudgingly appreciate the horrors we see. Things really aren't taken to their gory extremes here, and we're drawn in by the build-ups and the aftermaths if not always the climactic moments of death or dismemberment (thank goodness). In this way -- that is, both aesthetically and in terms of pure storytelling -- the first Saw is less exploitative than you might expect, except for its delicious, cruelly nihilistic ending, and far more cognitively entrancing.

Saw II (2005) ----- Score: 3.5 / 5

Saw III (2006) ---- Score: 2.5 / 5
The next two installments are fun enough continuations of the story established by the first Saw. In the second, Tobin Bell is fleshed out a bit, making the character more than a creepy puppet and invisible criminal mastermind. You might expect him to be less terrifying in the flesh, and perhaps he is, but Bell's performance is surprisingly chilling. Moreover, the story here is rather deliciously sadistic, pruning off the slower and more dramatic impulses of the first film and ramping up the suspense, gore, and psychological torment. It doesn't work as well for me, but it still a bloody good time.
In the third, what might be seen as a sort of finale to Jigsaw's trilogy, things get a bit weirder. Specifically, Tobin Bell returns but is given precious little to do, other than suggestively tormenting his apprentice, a repeat survivor-turned-acolyte named Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith). The central plot device -- that is, excuse for gore-porn -- is of a man obsessed with vengeance on the man who killed his son while drunk driving. He goes through several trials which mostly involve watching other people suffer and die in the name of hoping to finally get his revenge. Obviously there's a lesson to be learned, but this movie is notably more somber and less entertaining. The violence finally does feel exploitative and the lessons by now are not original or interesting. This movie is the death of Jigsaw and, for me, the franchise.

Saw IV (2007) -----Score: 1 / 5

Saw V (2008) ----- Score: 0.5 / 5
In what I suppose was meant to be a clever follow-up by the same director, the story of Saw IV weaves its way around previous installments. It's an extended epilogue that feels like a sicko's fan fiction based on the premise that Jigsaw had "games" planned for after his own death. Apparently he had collected more victims-turned-friends (acolytes) who had been trained (brainwashed) into helping him spread his gospel (torture and murder), and the revelation of those folks is the mission of this movie. Other than the gruesome and notably uninspired death traps, the film falters in basic cinematography and editing techniques; it's almost incoherent in convoluted plot twists around characters we never know or care about. The only worthwhile thing in this movie is its very handsome leading man, Lyriq Bent.
We get more of the same crap in the fifth film, which follows the "hero" (last man standing) of the fourth into more traps and more sadistic games that make less sense as time continues. It becomes increasingly clear that someone is toying with him, and it's very probably a fellow officer (spoiler alert from the previous flick, which means the suspense in V is nonexistent: it is, and our hero is going to be the victim and scapegoat). I almost kind of liked the subplot this time around, in which five people are forced through a series of communal tests like in II and fail miserably. The dialogue is laughable, editing bizarre, and grimy aesthetic worn and unoriginal. This is grindhouse trash at its most base, and there's nothing here worth wasting your time.

Saw VI (2009) ----- Score: 0.5 / 5

Saw 3D: The Final Chapter (2010) ----- Score: 0 / 5
I suppose 4-6 constitute the sequel trilogy to the first three Saw flicks, and it's just disappointing, following Jigsaw's successor Hoffman working hard to continue the sadistic criminal legacy. The sixth makes pretensions to be relevant and interesting regarding the necessity of health care reform in America, but this isn't The Purge. Relevance in Saw is about as immaterial as the characters' lives; they're all only so much meat and blood. And then there's the seventh installment, a monstrous waste of time that insults long-time fans as well as its general audience. Its 3-D attempt at novelty squelches beneath muddied aesthetics and muddled storytelling, leading up to a finale that might have been a weirdly cool idea (Cary Elwes is back!) except that it's the exact same plot contrivance featured in every single installment of the series: someone "unexpected" is the real killer, a Jigsaw apprentice trying to carry on the sadistic legacy.
The series should have said "Game Over" a long time ago.

Jigsaw (2017) ----- Score: 1 / 5
Seven years later and almost no steps forward. When Jigsaw starts, I was expecting something a little different. The camera feels fresh, the atmosphere is a bit lighter, there's more explicitly stupid-funny dialogue. The kills are less gory and more absurd -- one involves being stuck in a silo, buried in grain and various sharp farm tools -- and I thought we might be in for a solid reboot. The story is structured in the same way as others in the series, with one plotline following a group of individuals getting tortured and murdered, and the other following law enforcement chasing down the big baddie. Unfortunately, this movie is exactly like the others -- read: more of the same trash -- in its excessive exposition, unwieldy plot turns, and pointless intrigue that leads to a climax in which yet another new accomplice or apprentice is unmasked. It doesn't help, this time, that there are major contrivances with the franchise timeline, as if that makes it more profound or interesting. Spoiler: it doesn't.