Missing review – smart internet thriller

Billed as a standalone sequel to the 2018 film Searching, which starred John Cho as a father trawling the murkiest corners of the internet to locate his daughter, Missing takes the same approach – like Searching, the film plays out entirely on a computer desktop – to follow a teenager’s desperate attempt to find her mother after she doesn’t return from a holiday in Colombia with her new boyfriend. The two movies share further DNA – Missing’s first-time directors, Nicholas D Johnson and Will Merrick, worked as editors on Searching, and Searching’s writer-director, Aneesh Chaganty, is the producer here. The inventive approach and the frantic energy of the storytelling elevate the picture above its slightly gimmicky formal device, though this film lacks the novelty value that made Searching such a talking point. A considerable asset is Storm Reid, who stars as the tech-savvy June and serves as our anchor throughout a smart but occasionally preposterous thriller.

• In cinemas now