A Girl Missing feels torn between a slippery character study and a social thriller, and it suffers from the absence of the puzzle pieces it declines to reveal.
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What are critics saying?
Kôji Fukada adores stray textures that stick in the proverbial throat and free-associatively affirm his characters’ rootlessness.
A Girl Missing is a story about someone trying to make themselves whole again, but so much of its energy is spent on keeping her apart.
The intriguing ambiguity suffusing Kôji Fukada’s “Harmonium” returns to a certain degree in A Girl Missing, but this time the writer-director neglects to reinforce onscreen relationships, resulting in a disappointing and unmoving drama.
The New York Times by Jeannette Catsoulis
As he proved in his 2017 drama, “Harmonium,” Fukada excels at unfurling near-hysterical narratives in restrained, sometimes icily sterile scenes. But while the earlier film pulled us in, this one repels, its cloudy colors and depressing mood making us long for a single moment of joy.
The Hollywood Reporter by John DeFore
This would be a very different movie in most other hands, and in many cases, a worse one. Still, there's something missing in this look at a happy life's destruction.
The Film Stage by Leonardo Goi
A Girl Missing feels just as lost and hapless as its lead–more than on a quest for vengeance, a woman in search of a fully shaped self.
Screen Daily by Lisa Nesselson
A deft and absorbing multi-pronged tale about a kind, hard-working woman whose life becomes a morass of collateral damage, A Girl Missing is satisfying slow-burn drama expertly told.
Fukada has delivered another subtle, startling and demanding drama about lives upended in a country that rarely gives us any hint this sort of thing happens, a film built on stoic performances that give up their reserve when the worst kind of pressure is applied.