Debuts don’t come much more pungent than Shinzo Katayama’s “Siblings of the Cape” (2019). With so many Japanese filmmakers content to be merely tasteful, it was hard not to get your feathers ruffled by a drama about a man pimping out his severely autistic sister.
For his follow-up, Katayama has managed to transition to a larger-scale production without losing his sting. “Missing” is a twisty, frequently audacious movie that had me teetering on the brink of my seat, wondering where it was going to head next.
Some of Katayama’s earliest credits were working as an assistant director for Bong Joon-ho (“Parasite”), and “Missing” has elements that will be familiar to fans of the South Korean heavyweight: the genre trappings, abrupt tonal shifts and social critique. That’s a good thing, incidentally.