Missing

Ji-seon is about to lose custody of her child in a divorce case; she works, cannot keep up, and hires a nanny. Han-mae, a Chinese woman, does the job well, looks after the baby and moves in. One day Ji-seon comes home and neither the nanny nor the baby is there. The police do not take it seriously; they even find inconsistencies in the mother's own account. She starts searching alone, and the more she looks into Han-mae's real identity the more she meets an entirely different story. E.oni directs. Uhm Ji-won plays Ji-seon and Gong Hyo-jin plays Han-mae. The structure divides in two. The first half is a thriller about a disappearance, the second the story of the woman who took the child; at a certain point the narrative changes sides and, uncomfortably, gives both of them their case. The subject is the situation of migrant women in Korea: women brought into the country through marriage, without the language, legally dependent on their husbands. Both leads are women, which the film sustains in a way uncommon in mainstream Korean cinema; the male characters stand only for the system. Gong Hyo-jin was known for comedy and is somewhere entirely different here; the performance is the most discussed thing about it. The weakness is the last section; the tension resolves into a chase and the moral tangle the film had built is simplified. Who it is for: viewers who like Korean thrillers and genre films carrying a social argument. Who it is not for: the subject is heavy, some scenes are explicit, and the ending overloads the emotion.