I watched Megan Is Missing because it is a found footage drama, and I have a weakness for the genre, but I wish that I skipped this one. Megan Is Missing is about two unlikely best friends, a popular hard partier and a goody two shoes. The goody two shoes does some amateur sleuthing when her friend goes missing with disastrous results. Megan Is Missing is a compilation of home video footage, recorded video chats, security camera footage and news broadcasts.
Megan Is Missing feels like a prurient afterschool special take on The Vanishing, a new take on Sid Davis’ 1950s and 1960s cautionary education film, i.e. well meaning propaganda used to scare teens from straying from the straight and narrow. Megan Is Missing is ostensibly about the dangers of online communications with strangers, but the majority of the film shows the titular character drinking, using drugs, having sex and being disrespectful to her mom while her friend stands innocently as a bystander. I did not even know that she was an excellent student until she went missing. Megan is constantly contrasted with her nice friend. Megan has no father figure, is a victim of sexual abuse though it is depicted as precocious behavior to titillate the audience and is less financially stable than her friend as depicted in a scene when her mom screams about work. In contrast, Megan’s virginal friend has a loving father, a bright and spacious home and stuffed animals.
Megan Is Missing is really a social guidance film warning good girls not to get drawn into the dangerous wake of damaged girls. When we see what happened to Megan, it is a grotesque reprise of her earlier childhood sexual exploit and is framed as a punishment for promiscuity. Megan Is Missing depicts sexual violence as punishment for fast girls and the girls who are innocent, but unwise enough to remain friends with them. Megan Is Missing is advising nice girls to stay away from bad girls like Megan or face certain doom.
As if the conflation of childhood sexual abuse and underage sexual promiscuity is not bad enough, Megan Is Missing has the similar, exploitive leering eye with a veneer of gritty reality as Larry Clarke’s Kids, which I hated. I found all the inappropriate underage shenanigans painfully inane and prurient. Megan Is Missing’s gritty veneer is reminiscent of real life tragedies such as the Carlie Brucia case when security camera footage revealed a stranger leading away the teen by the hand. I would issue a trigger warning for viewers sensitive to depictions of sexual violence, which is unflinching and extended in an infamous three-minute scene. Sadly reality is more gruesome as women like Jaycee Dugard and the three women who escaped the perversions of Ariel Castro can attest to.
Megan Is Missing has a handful of chilling and effective thriller moments particularly when the online culprit and the virginal friend begin to interact, but those moments are not worth the residual unpleasant aftertaste of fictional snuff film. Skip seeing Megan Is Missing.