One of my favorite comedies has a title that always makes me laugh: and Searching, Missing follows a teenage girl (Storm Reid), as she attempts to hunt her mother down online after she goes, you guessed it, missing. I’m a sucker for movies that take place entirely through a computer screen, so I’m willing to look past the title—though folks online have already been cackling over Storm Reid’s line “STOP SCROLLING!” in the trailer. Missing is coming in hot to replace M3GAN.
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Unfriended was a brilliant name for a thriller, especially since the film takes place through social media websites on a computer screen. Short, but it also teases a greater disconnect. Then there’s Searching, the reverse of Missing, in which John Cho attempts to locate his missing daughter. But even “searching” is a double entendre—as Cho is “searching” for her, he’s also “searching” the internet for traces of her.
Missing, on the other hand, uses this same participle-as-title convention but isn’t a play on words in any way. Maybe there’s an app called “missing” or some other cheeky use of the word in the movie. But from what I can tell, it’s a lazy way to keep this straightforward title trend going. Alas, it does make me laugh, because the title Missing feels like the Airplane! of online mystery movies.
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There are a handful of other recent titles that come to mind. Beast, Idris Elba’s freakishly delightful action comedy featuring a massive lion, made me laugh. “We need to go see BEAST,” I would bellow to my friends, drawing out the word like it was a big creature in and of itself. There’s Sick, an upcoming thriller heading to Peacock about a few friends quarantining during the pandemic. The titles Emily the Criminal and Emily in Paris paint me distinct portraits of two very different Emilys in a very straightforward way.
I pray that this trend continues. I similarly hope that, unlike Airplane!, the blunt movie titles will be used in total earnest—which makes them even funnier. What if Titanic was called Boat? Or Tár was simply titled Conductor? We could take the “girl” out of Gone Girl and “on the Orient Express” out of Murder on the Orient Express. The simpler and more chaotic, the better.
