Rating: B
Dir: Michael Goi
Star: Amber Perkins, Rachel Quinn, Dean Waite, Jael Elizabeth Steinmeyer
This film has a strange history. Originally made in 2007, it then sat on the shelf for four years before being released. Nobody then paid it much attention – except for the New Zealand censors, who refused the a certificate, believing it was ‘injurious to the public good’. [Interestingly, the movie doesn’t appear ever to have been submitted to the BBFC] It wasn’t until 2020 that it became a TikTok trend, with people posting their reactions to it. This has resurfaced occasionally since, with the #meganismissing tag having more than 83 million views. But a lot of people hate the film with a passion, even among fans of horror and extreme cinema. Indeed, this review was partly triggered (pun intended) by a heavily upvoted Reddit thread which said there was, “zero taste, zero class. Nothing positive to take out of this movie.”
Given its online fame, it’s surprising there are only five reviews for it on Rotten Tomatoes. But have some more choice quotes. Naturally, it was straight to Tubi for me, after these ringing endorsements.
- “Repellent, manipulative schlock that feels like it’s salivating over the very abuses it pretends to condemn.” – Michael Gingold, Fangoria
- “There is no substance at all. No style either. A forgettable, rotten movie that I’ll never ever watch again.” – C.H. Newell
- “A terrible ending that mistakes overtly shocking imagery for genuine horror.” — Elizabeth Esten
- “Probably the worst horror movie I’ve seen. The acting is horrendous… No redeeming points for this movie.” — /r/horror
Now, I do partly feel obliged to make a case for the defense, in part because YourChannelMovieSucks did a video on it. [Challenge: survive twenty-one minutes of nasal Canadian whining. Level: impossible] But I think it genuinely works. Its goal was simple: scare the bejesus out of parents about the perils of the Internet. I can’t speak for anyone else, but as a parent of a once-teenage girl, if I’d seen this at the time, she’d have been locked in the house and not permitted computer access until her twenty-first birthday. Some people forget what the Internet was like in 2007. Subtle? No, this certainly is not. But, newsflash: if you are wanting to make a message like this stick with people, subtlety does not work, on teenagers or parents. Folk need to be given the cinematic equivalent of a whack upside the head with a brick. Enter Megan is Missing, as the brick.
It’s the story of 14-year-olds, Megan Stewart (Perkins) and Amy Herman (Quinn), who are best friends despite being polar opposites. Megan is the party girl, whose home life sucks; Amy is the quiet one, with loving parents. Initially Megan, then Amy, fall victim to “Josh” (Waite), a predator they encounter online. Megan is the first to be abducted, and we subsequently see snatches of the search and media hype. Between bad re-enactment and performative tragedy, the latter element is as much pitch-black comedy as anything. There’s a sequence where Amy’s classmates, who hated her when she was alive, tie pink ribbons on trees: “Hopefully it’ll make whoever took her, you know, feel bad and let her go.” You cannot tell me that is other than the darkest of satire.
There are claims about the dialogue being unrealistic, though quite how middle-aged dudes like YMS know how teenage girls talk, is likely a matter for their probation officer. Similarly, the top review on Letterboxd (where it currently has a rating of 1.6) includes the classic line, “The BDSM imagery is clearly derived from someone who is very familiar with what that looks like.” Um, and again: the reviewer knows this how? Me, I defer to those 83 million views on TikTok. But it is interesting to see the reviews from actual children on Common Sense Media. While they are all over the place, I note few say “That’s not how we talk.”
But what I particularly respect – particularly impressive, given my general dislike of found footage – is the way the film goes from after-school special to A Serbian Film with the flick of a caption. For, after luring us in with an hour of mostly PG13-rated chit-chat, the final 22 minutes are the last footage captured by Amy on her birthday present camcorder. These are not easy watching. As in, if Chris had come in, I’d have had some explaining to do to her, with – I guess, spoiler warning, for those not on the TakTuk – the real-time rape of Amy, who then gets stuffed into a barrel and buried alive. Oh, and the barrel isn’t empty either. It’s as bleakly nihilistic an ending as you can imagine.
There had been some hints to the sheer creepiness of this feature earlier. Megan describing, in far too graphic detail, her first blow-job, at age ten(!). Two photos, supposedly found in the darker corners of the Internet, depicting a post-abduction Megan in a genuinely disturbing position (above). But I’d say these are still insufficient to prepare you for the last quarter. It’s the resulting contrast, which makes it far more impactful, to me, than the likes of Blair Witch. The mundane carpet of the early stages is yanked away, and you instead get something which is highly uncomfortable to watch in its relentlessness. And it’s not just the “bad girl” who suffers either. The armour of morality provides no defense.
It is these elements which stick with me, past the amateurish performances and low-rent nature of the found footage – as so often, used to disguise a low budget, here of only thirty-five grand. I’m fine with the fact that it clearly is not “real” found footage, because a movie truly shot on a 2007 flip cell-phone would be unwatchable. The opposite goes for the acting, because there’s a palpable difference between real people, and actors pretending to be real people. The former are awkward, with speech that doesn’t flow, and no clue how to behave on camera. To get that level of rawness, you either need very good actors or very inexperienced ones, and Goi went the latter route.
While you may not like the goals here, this is a film which is unquestionably successful in what it sets out to do. I never need to watch it again though.