Mark Reviews Movies: A GIRL MISSING

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 30, 2020

People typically don't show everything they are or say everything they're thinking, because such honesty can be terrifying for the shower/speaker and uncomfortable for the receiver. There is a lot of deception in A Girl Missing, not only by and from the characters, but also from and by co-writer/director Kôji Fukada. These are big lies or little fibs or acts of omission, but they build and build, just as Fukada's story does, until the only thing left is the hard, almost absurd truth.

The story is mostly about Ichiko (Mariko Tsutsui), an in-home nurse. She has become close to one patient's two granddaughters, elder Motoko (Mikako Ichikawa) and younger Saki (Miyu Ogawa). One day, Ichiko arrives at the house to discover that Saki has gone missing.

A few days later, the teenage girl returns. The police have a suspect in custody. He's Tatsuo (Ren Sudo), Ichiko's nephew.

Ichiko wants to tell the family about her relationship to Saki's abductor, but Motoko insists that the nurse stay silent. She does, while also preparing to move in with her doctor fiancé (played by Mitsuru Fukikoshi), a relationship she doesn't publicize, because of a sense of professionalism or because she doesn't really love him—or both.

The plot is driven by these lies and falsehoods, which become more sinister the longer they're allowed to fester. We can see through some of them, such as Motoko's motive for wanting to keep Ichiko close (There's a striking pair of shots during a conversation between the two, as Motoko's face is kept in shadow by backlighting, while Ichiko's is fully illuminated). Most, though, are only revealed as much as Fukada needs to, in order to make his point (Tatsuo's motive and the extent of his crime, for example, are never disclosed).

The big deception on Fukada's part involves a mysterious woman with a "familiar face," getting closer and closer to Motoko's boyfriend (played by Sôsuke Ikematsu). Without revealing the game here, Tsutsui's performance is exceptional, as she essentially or actually plays two different characters—one before the crime and the other after becoming the victim of a campaign against her character. A Girl Missing seems to be heading toward a routine climax, as a character plots revenge, but here, with unbridled laughter and a car horn mimicking what would be a useless scream, the anticlimactic nature of it all is the real point.

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