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As he follows the man, the noir tropes roll out incessantly. Rosow gets roughed-up by a cordial Mexican gangster (Yul Vasquez) and gets chatted-up by a sultry lady-for-hire (Margaret Colin) as he begins to wonder just what his assignment is all about. By the time he meets Harold Fullmer (Frank Wood), the man he has been tracking, it does not take long for him to realize that Fullmer used his survival of the 9/11 attacks to find meaning in his life. Rosow feels his pain, for reasons that become glaringly apparent, eventually revealing a blithe metaphor for Rosow's own loss.
Buschel has the makings here of a very fascinating film, and there are even moments where he grazes the sort of sparseness that would have made The Missing Person a more haunting affair. These moments keep the film rolling on without allowing it to become too unbearable. But the director, who also wrote the screenplay, winds up being the servant of two masters: Buschel cannot fully realize the urgent modernity of his tale, so beholden is he to a rigid noir structure.
To put it simply, The Missing Person is neither the existential 70s crime thriller it wants to be nor the apocalyptic fever dream it could have been. Buschel often frames his actors in close-up and catches them in states of bewilderment, intrigue and panic. It's interesting to watch, especially when taking in the talented Shannon with his twitchy, bug-eyed intensity. It often fails, however, to evolve the gloomy mood that Buschel is striving for and gives the film an odd, off-putting claustrophobia.
Around the middle of the film, Shannon tells Colin's boozy pick-up artist that he's playing hide and seek in LA. 'That's a game that kids play,' she says. 'Well, if you add some money to it, it's for adults,' he sharply responds. A line so deliciously pulpy deserves tighter form to frame it, but Buschel's film feels too aimless. Even more praise due to Shannon then: Given a more visually coherent, atmospheric film, he could have proven to be the paranoid Philip Marlowe for the Tweet Generation.
