The Missing Person: Critic Reviews

Buschel makes striking use of the Mike Hammer/Philip Marlowe tradition to tell a story of disorientation and loss in a post-9/11 world where the Twin Towers can go missing too.

Sluggish, stylized and frequently washed in a bilious green tint, The Missing Person is yet oddly irresistible, its omnipresent anxiety like a musical chord that neither rises nor falls.

All of which is well and artsy, but doesn't diminish the sense, once the mystery has untangled, that the film has been gesturing toward a profundity that isn't there.

The real mystery here is how writer-director Noah Buschel talked recent supporting Oscar nominees Michael Shannon and Amy Ryan into doing this movie.

A drab, pale-looking affair without a trace of visual style, this cross-country pursuit yarn fights a losing battle to sustain viewer attention via narrative alone, so much does it flounder for lack of imagistic flair.

"So you make jokes and smoke cigarettes," a lady in the murk summarizes. Yeah. Isn't that enough?

It's a great-looking movie, with an evocative use of music and, in rugged-yet-sensitive Michael Shannon, has an actor whose forceful, focused presence is the film's sturdy linchpin.

There's a pretty good film if you give writer-director Noah Buschel a chance. The 31-year-old crafts a convincing noir tale, with a sense of realism that makes the experience pleasingly voyeuristic.

Most of it is admittedly a lot of fun, especially when the characters come out intriguingly sideways.

Michael Shannon adds another stunning performance to his resume with this small-scale neo-noir by writer/director Noah Buschel.

It's beautiful dread.

Michael Shannon is a handsome kook whose turns in Revolutionary Road, Bug and this have earmarked him to be the next Jack Nicholson (or at least the next Christopher Walken)

The Missing Person isn't merely a clever, cool spin on the classic private eye story, but it also works as a private eye story. It showcases a lurching, hunched, quietly lived-in performance by Shannon but offers more than just that performance. ...

Why has The Missing Person persisted in staying with me, even though I started craving The Big Sleep halfway through?

Shannon's complete performance, he moves like The Elephant Man and enunciates like Mickey Rourke, allows Buschel to drift into David Lynch territory without getting drowned in it.

The moments that do undeniably work are overshadowed by a general feeling that the film just isn't quite clicking the way it could or should have, amplified by a final act that simply gets away from everyone involved.

A reasonable approximation of the style, capturing Shannon at his most coolly insular.

neither the existential 70s crime thriller it wants to be nor the apocalyptic fever dream it could have been

Shannon's performance takes The Missing Person as far as it goes, but when a real-world tragedy commandeers the story, Buschel's thin pastiche falls to pieces.

Not the most riveting of noir dramas, this film exists mainly to project the talents of Michael Shannon in the role of a drunk private eye.

Though Ryan Samul's textured cinematography makes the stubble and shadows seem nearly 3-D, the story chokes on a dull twist from Rosow's past.

The film's second half appears primed to tread some interesting existential territory, but Buschel seems confused about what direction he means to take his material.