‘Missing’: A kidnapping story fully aware of loss

In Japanese films and TV dramas, the kidnapping of a child is an all-too familiar plot device aimed at wringing out audience tears. But none have come close to the gripping, dry-eyed thriller Akira Kurosawa crafted in 1963’s “High and Low.”

Keisuke Yoshida’s “Missing” takes a fresh, less melodramatic tack. Instead of frantic parents and furrow-browed cops huddled around a phone waiting for a call, the film, scripted by Yoshida, begins three months after the abduction of a 6-year-old girl (Tsugumi Arita) in a seaside town. When we first meet her working-class parents — the stoic Yutaka (Munetaka Aoki) and frazzled Saori (Satomi Ishihara) — they are handing out flyers in front of a train station as a reporter (Tomoya Nakamura) and cameraman from a local TV station film them.

The kidnapper has stayed silent while Saori’s socially awkward brother Keigo (Yusaku Mori) is under a cloud of suspicion as the last one seen with the girl. Meanwhile, Saori has become a target of internet vitriol for having been at a pop concert when her daughter went missing. And though the reporter is an earnest, conscientious type who sincerely wants to help find the girl, his bosses are demanding more sensationalism to boost the now-old story’s fading public interest.

This toxic brew of personal tragedy, media exposure and social media auto-da-fe was also present in Yoshida’s “Intolerance” (2021), but whereas in the earlier film the protagonist — a short-fused father who lost his only daughter in a freak accident — becomes consumed with rage, in “Missing” the mother is torn between self-blame and increasingly forlorn hope.

Ishihara, who came to international attention for her performance as a Japanese American envoy in 2016’s “Shin Godzilla” (and caught flack for her shaky command of English), plays Saori with a total commitment and raw vulnerability that lifts her performance above the “hysterical mother” cliche.

True, she melts down time and time again, and berates her infinitely forbearing husband for what she interprets as his lack of passion and commitment, but her inconsolable anguish and deep self-loathing (which her obsessive reading of online haters exacerbates) invites compassion instead of contempt. Calling her out for overdoing it begins to feel heartless, like scolding a dog for howling after it has been hit by a truck.

The film is more than a record of one couple’s helpless agony, though: It also becomes a penetrating examination of how the media works in Japan (and elsewhere). The reporter is repeatedly forced to compromise his ideals in pursuit of a story, knowing that he will hurt people he cares about. Meanwhile, a smarmy younger rival wins a promotion on the basis of a salacious scoop and is applauded by the entire newsroom.

But as hard as Yoshida can be on his characters, he is in implicit sympathy with them. And though his portrait of contemporary Japan is dark, he allows for the possibility of healing and growth.

Finally, for all its docudrama-like starkness and harshness, “Missing” builds to moments of tenderness and grace, illuminated by a soft, somehow consoling light. It also clearly illustrates the difference between sentiment and sentimentality, being full of the former but absent the latter. Any tears come not from directorial manipulation but a gathering awareness that Saori’s loss is also our own.