Streaming Spotlight by Cindy Summers
Missing – Netflix
When her mother Grace (Nia Long) went on a vacation with her new boyfriend Kevin (Ken Leung) to Colombia, June (Storm Reid) did as many teenagers would do and had a great time partying with her friends, but when she went to pick her mom and boyfriend up from the airport they never arrived. June contacted the hotel where they had been staying and was told that they left but had left everything including all their luggage and belongings at the hotel, so she contacted her mom’s friend Heather (Amy Landecker). They contacted the U.S. Embassy in Columbia and spoke with FBI Agent Park (Daniel Henney) who told them that unfortunately the issue was not within their jurisdiction, but that they would try to help in any ways they could to locate June’s mother.
Stuck in a sea of bureaucratic red tape, June used her tech savvy skills and set out to find her mother. She was able to locate images of the hotel online, which showed security cameras, but the manager said the tapes were overwritten every 48 hours and would have to be looked through in person. This was obviously impossible with June in L.A., so she used the TaskRabbit app and hired a Columbian local named Javier (Joaquim de Almeida) to be her boots on the ground in her search. Javier found out that Grace and Kevin were seen in a hardware store nearby purchasing a padlock, and when June searched nearby tourist sites, she found a place called the Walled City Love Lock Bridge.
June searched through live cam footage in the area, and saw her mom’s new boyfriend propose to her on the bridge, but unfortunately a short time later as she followed them on webcams throughout the city she saw them both abducted by several men who grabbed them and drove away in a white van. June knew she needed to find out more about her mom’s relationship with her new boyfriend and after hacking both their email accounts discovered that several years ago Kevin had gone to prison for several years in Texas for conning women while using multiple fake names. June immediately contacted Agent Park, but he said he was already aware of that information and that Kevin served his time and was currently using his real name.
As June dug deeper into Kevin’s information, she found out that he had actually contacted another woman who looked similar to her mother just prior to the trip and assumed they were having an affair. When June shared the information with Agent Park, he told her that legally they could not use any information June got from Kevin’s hacked email and asked that she just be patient and let them handle the situation. Agent Park said they was much more going on than June was aware of that he was not able to share, but asked June if she knew if her mother had ever gone by any other name. June said she didn’t know anything about that, but told him she had tried to reach out to the other woman and discovered she had also been missing for two weeks.
June kept digging through emails, credit card accounts, uber tracking and the online dating app where Grace and Kevin met which all raised more answers than questions. June also had to contend with an international media frenzy over her mom’s disappearance when the video of them being abducted went viral. The whole story blew up around the world when it was discovered that her mom had other identities than Grace Allen, and appeared to at some point in her past had disappeared to start a new life. This was news to June who only knew her life to be that her father passed away when she was young and her mom raised her as a single parent.
This would not be the last thing to surprise June in this ever changing story which would result in her learning her mom’s friend Heather was more that just a friend and that it seemed a possibility through the evidence they discovered that Grace may not had even been in Columbia, that she may never have left L.A. and that June’s own life may be in danger from the past.
Rated: PG-13
Runtime: 1h 51m
