Missing Girl Review | A Lot More Than a Girl Is Missing From This Movie

My expectations were spectacularly low for the movie Missing Girl, as the film’s trailer clearly showed the amateurishness in the making. Compared to what they made me anticipate from the film, I would say the actual film looked better. Having said that, the film is still one lazy and sloppy work with nothing new to offer rather than a bunch of forgettable new faces.

Two YouTubers who make content about haunted houses are approached by a man. The guy wants them to create a haunted house image for his ancestral property so that nobody will buy it and the property won’t get demolished. The duo agreed to do the video, but it was only when they arrived at the location they understood the other side of the story. What happens after that and what really happened in that house is what we see in Missing Girl.

Almost 15 minutes into the film, we see our Youtubers casually talking to a ghost about what really happened to her. I mean, on paper, it looks like a cliche breaker. But when you see it, it feels awkwardly odd. Then the story goes to flashback, and everything about that backstory is ultra generic. The revenge plan of the ghost before she became a ghost will remind you of those old revenge stories where the heroine uses seduction to kill the bad folks. Looking at the placement and visualization of certain songs, you might feel like questioning the intent of the filmmakers. At times it is almost a U-certified soft porn movie.

The writing is predictably bad, and Abdul Rasheed’s movie just follows the guessable trajectories to create a typical horror film. You just can’t see the effort from a writing point of view to deliver something that will be unique in some way. The only thing that looked surprisingly good was the cinematography by Shihab Ongallur. He is playing with lights, color palettes, and framing to add some sort of depth to the banal story. But with no other department showing a similarly sincere effort, it never becomes an evident saving grace for the movie.

Sanju Somanath, as Anna, gets to do the main character in the film. Her dialogue delivery is flawed, and her expressions are minimal. But it seems like the makers intended to cast someone who could pull off the seduction part convincingly, and in that aspect, she works for the film. Another Instagram sensation Ashika Ashokan is also in the movie in a prominent role, but she is only made to dance in hot clothes. Bhaskar Arvind and Afsal K Aziz are forgettable. Vishnu Balakrishnan, Shaheer Muhammed, and Santhosh Krishna have prominent roles in the film. But the performances are pretty ordinary.

Clocking at 111 minutes, Missing Girl might not be a patience tester as it doesn’t linger on to any particular phase in the story. But the confidence to make such lazily written films is actually a bit alarming. The movie starts with wishes for aspiring filmmakers saying, “If we could do it, you can also do it.” Well, when I look back at that now, it feels like a motivational quote by Dhinchak Pooja to all those who aspired to be AR Rahman.