Missing
Khoi Vinh

Review by Khoi Vinh Patron

Missing 1982

★★★★½

Watched 26 Jul 2024

The first twenty minutes or so are exactly what I expected from a Costa-Gravas movie about post-coup chaos in a Latin American country. Which is to say it’s incredibly frenetic and uncommonly terrifying; more than any other director, he understands the horrors that anti-democratic powers can create for people. Then Jack Lemmon shows up and the movie pivots to a quest that he and Sissy Spaceck undertake together, and it becomes something I wasn’t really prepared for: gut wrenchingly emotional and personal. Not that it’s one iota less political than “Z” or Costa-Gravas’s other works. In fact it feels even more political, thanks to a directorial confidence that I hadn’t seen before in his work: he pulls back on his complex social constructs just enough to allow two magnificent performances from Lemmon and Spacek that make his recurrent themes feel much more specific, more human, and more tangibly possible than before.

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