Synopsis
The narrative of Missing is simple and straightforward. While the multiple personality disorder featured in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho focuses on inwardness, here it stems from an obvious family tragedy caused by external circumstances. Pan Gon who made a tolerable living from his poultry farm, lives with his aged mother. Since his wife’s desertion, he has been abducting, raping, and murdering women out of rage and vengefulness. A woman who didn’t listen to her older sister, a policeman only after personal gain, and a dog-seller fixated on money and women start dying one after another. Gory crimes and unspeakable brutalities prompted by social discontent have often been shown on the news, but in Missing, they unfold in markedly facile form. This is the point that both approximates this movie to and distinguishes it from Memories of Murder and The Chaser, which sublimated real-life murder cases into genre films. Hyeon Jeong’s question to the lawyer—“Do you have a daughter?”—fails to resonate, and what she is left with after punishing her sister’s killer are the prosecution’s questions about revenge and self-defense. The final tableau, which yokes together an old man on a boat with some female college students like a media reenactment of a case, is rather bizarre. (Alice YOO)