Missing (2023)
When her mother disappears during a trip to Colombia with her new boyfriend, a tech-savvy teenage daughter uses digital tools and online sleuthing to search for answers from Los Angeles. As she digs deeper, she uncovers secrets about her mother and the man who traveled with her. The investigation becomes more complicated as international red tape and misleading clues stand in her way.
Narrative Score
Full Plot & Ending Explained
Intro
June Allen, a Los Angeles teenager, lives with her mother Grace after the death of her father James, and when Grace leaves for a week-long vacation in Cartagena, Colombia, with her new boyfriend Kevin, June is left behind and expects to pick them up on their return.
Turning Point 1
When Grace and Kevin do not arrive at Los Angeles International Airport, June learns from the hotel in Cartagena that their luggage never left the hotel, so she starts calling people, contacts the FBI and the U.S. consulate, and realizes no one can act quickly enough for her.
Turning Point 2
Refusing to wait, June investigates online on her own, hires Colombian gig worker Javier through a task app, and uses Kevin’s email, accounts, and digital footprint to uncover that he has used multiple aliases, has a criminal history, and had been scamming women for money.
Turning Point 3
June follows a trail from Kevin’s messages and purchases to Nevada, where she meets Jimmy, a man at a Christian rehabilitation center who claims Kevin has changed and is genuinely trying to build a new life, but June remains suspicious and keeps digging.
Turning Point 4
June discovers that the FBI’s apparent kidnapping video is fabricated, then learns Kevin arranged for a lookalike actress, Rachel Page, to impersonate Grace; this false trail exposes that Grace was already in danger before the supposed airport departure and that Kevin has been manipulating events from the start.
Turning Point 5
As June’s search widens, she uncovers that Grace had her own hidden life and had been working with Heather, her divorce-lawyer friend, to change her identity and cut ties with her past; when Heather is found dead, June realizes the situation is far more tangled than a simple kidnapping.
Turning Point 6
The truth finally converges when June learns the man holding Grace is not Kevin but James, her supposedly dead father, who had survived and orchestrated the abduction to reunite with his daughter and reclaim his family under a false identity.
Ending
June is kidnapped, finds Grace imprisoned in James’s house, and in the final confrontation June and Grace escape the violence, while James is defeated; Grace is shot during the struggle, but mother and daughter survive and are reunited after the full truth about the family’s lies and manipulations comes out.
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