It's going to be hard to write the movie without spoilers, so I will tell you when I get to anything spoiler-y, but it would probably be best to watch it before reading this if you don't want to be spoiled about anything! It is also not necessary to watch Searching to know what's going on. They're set in the same universe, but the stories have nothing to do with each other.
Our protagonist is an eighteen-year-old girl named June (Storm Reid) who easily gets annoyed with her mom, Grace (Nia Long) and basically thinks she treats her like a baby. We get some backstory when the movie starts with a video clip from 2008 where we see a toddler-aged June with her father at "grandpa's house." We're barely five minutes into the movie, but right away, I'm like, I bet it's the dad! I bet he's behind it! Grace comes in the room just when young June notices her father's nose starts to bleed and he claims it's because of the altitude. The video stops and we see that someone is trimming it and making it into a file called "Last family trip". After seeing bookmarked pages such as "brain tumors and aneurysms" and "Helping Your Child Process Grief", it is clear that June's father is dead and there goes my theory about him being behind this whole thing. Obviously this is Grace's computer and we also see her delete her Google account and that they have moved from San Antonio to Los Angeles.
Cut to the current day and we see teen June watching a Netflix series called Unfiction (what a terrible name) about true crime cases that have been made into one-hour drama shows. We see she is watching episode 3, titled "The Disappearance of Margot Kim" which is a nice tie-in to Searching. When watching this the second time, I paused my own screen and saw that June had a site pulled up called "Fact vs. Fiction in Unficiton." One of the "facts" says "Real David Kim is [fire emoji]. (Uh, isn't that an opinion?) "Anyone else thinks he looks like that actor from Breakout (2020)??" So I thought this was a John Cho Easter egg, but when I looked at him filmography, he's not in anything from 2020 called Breakout, so I don't get it. The article also talks about how Debbie Massey is the actress who portrays Detective Rosemary Vick which is an obvious nod to Debra Messing. Yeah, so it's a fun little moment of the movie if you've seen Searching.
There is some foreshadowing when June pauses the movie and we see a summary of the episode which reads "After his 16-year-old daughter goes missing, a desperate father breaks into her laptop to look for clues to find her" and this is what June will do when her mom goes missing. Perhaps she was inspired by this faux Netflix series?
But before her mom goes missing, the movie sets up a few things: Grace is always using Siri for everything and it annoys June greatly; Grace calls June "Junebug" and it annoys June greatly; and Grace is always asking June to clear her voicemails in case she needs to leave a message.
Because of the way this movie is shot, June's laptop camera is always on so we can always see footage if she's talking to anyone in the same room. I don't know how realistic this is, but I guess it's needed for the movie. We see Kevin is there the day of the trip and he tells Grace that he loves her mom and that he planned this trip for a "very special reason", but before he can say anything more, Grace appears and he stops talking. It is June 11th and they will be coming back on the 20th. June is supposed to pick them up at the airport.
During the next week, we get a montage of June partying with her friends and she receives texts and photos from her mom and Kevin. They are both using Kevin's phone because she tells June that her texts aren't going through. This is another thing that makes more sense when you're watching it the second time. This is definitely a movie that benefits from watching a second time!
The day before she's supposed to pick up her mom and Kevin at LAX, she has a party at her house. Is she that stupid or did she just forget? The movie explains she's sad because it's Fathers Day and she never got to know her dad and she's having a party to forget about her sad feelings, but you would think she wouldn't have the party at her own house.
Of course her laptop camera is left on, so you're seeing the party. I still don't buy that people leave their cameras on for absolutely no reason, but they need to give us exposition and foreshadowing, like when we see one of the guests asking people if they've seen his Smartwatch. Believe it or not, this SmartWatch will come back later in the movie.
Her alarm goes off at eleven the next day and when she signs on to her laptop, she gets a notification about picking up her mom at eleven. Oh, dear. She's already way late. And I don't even know how far the airport is from where she lives, but I'm guessing it's not a simple five-minute drive! And to make matters worse, her house is a MESS. Her mom is gonna be so pissed. And I'm sure from the nightmare June will soon endure, she would rather deal with a pissed-off mother than a missing one!
June goes to TaskRabbit and hires somebody to clean up for her. She writes, "Key's under the mat. Please don't steal anything haha". I love that she added that "haha"; also I wouldn't trust some rand-o to clean my place, especially if I were gone. Luckily, her mom gave her some emergency money (probably not the kind of emergency she had in mind) so she's able to pay with that.
When she arrives at the airport, her phone camera is on and that's where we're viewing her from, but c'mon, who leaves their camera on like that? She's gonna waste the battery. I once accidentally had my camera on and was so annoyed because my battery was way low.
Even though she is upset, she seems to be pretty calm during this whole thing. She's not missing a beat, doing all the necessary things. She calls Heather who calls the U.S. Embassy in Colombia, but they're closed. They need to fill out a report and the embassy will call them tomorrow when they open. So June does that and the next morning she gets a call from the embassy. While on the phone, asking about the security tapes, she gets a reply back from the missing persons form she filled out saying they are not able to process it because she was missing a signature. That's gotta be so infuriating!
At this point, they have six hours left before the security cameras override. Detective Park, the detective she's been talking to, tells her the "FBI doesn't have jurisdiction to investigate in Colombia, so it may take some time while [they] work with local authorities." This is another thing that's gotta be infuriating. A woman is missing and this hotel is the last known place her daughter knows where she was...they can't break the rules a little to review the tapes to see if they can find any clues to her whereabouts?
The detective asks her questions about her mom like if she said or did anything unusual, but June can't think of anything. She tries to get into her mom's Google account, but the passwords she tries don't work. After updating her friend on what's going on, her friend suggests she check out live cameras in Cartagena. She flips through touristy spots and apparently you can go back and look at videos from a previous day. That seems kind of pointless to watch a "live" stream from days ago, but it will play a part in the movie later on.
out of five stars and one of the reviews we see made me laugh: "It took five hours to get my tacos, but Javi's a nice guy."
So it was bugging me when we meet Javi because he looked so familiar. He reminded me of Geoffrey Rush and I remember thinking this of an actor awhile ago and when I looked at his IMDb, I go, "Ohhhh! It's Salazar!" If you watched season 3 of 24, you know what I'm talking about!
Even though he doesn't do what she's asking of him, he agrees to help her. He gives her the idea to try to get into Kevin's phone since she can't get into her mom's phone. The only problem is how is she going to figure out Kevin's password? Well, luckily, her friend has come over to help. She can imitate a good deep voice, so they call Kevin's professional website and she pretends to be him and act like "he" lost "his" password. She needs to verify a few thing such as Kevin's date of birth and his mother's maiden name, which is easy enough to find on his Facebook. They also need the name of his elementary school and that proves to be a bit more difficult since it's not on his Facebook profile (I mean, why would it be?). So June quickly googles the name of the town he grew up in (luckily he had that listed) and there are two elementary schools there, so she has a fifty/fifty shot of getting it right, and of course she does.
Once June gets into Kevin's Google account, she looks at his location history and notices he has none for June 12, which I think is the day they left for Colombia.
Javi calls back to tell her the footage is gone. What a surprise! He talked to the cleaning lady who said she saw two American tourists leave on Friday. They were dressed up and she asks them where they were going and Kevin tells they're going to a hardware store. June looks up Kevin's credit card history (luckily he uses the same password for everything.) When she does that, we get an amusing and very relatable (at least for me!) moment where she hesitates for a second when she's supposed to select all the images with a bus in it. There's one square with the tiniest piece of the bus and she's not sure if she should select it or not. This scenario has happened to me so many times and it's so aggravating when you don't get it right and you have to do it again!
She next goes through Kevin's emails where she sees one about a security system camera being on its way. This will come back later, but right now she pays no mind to it. She does find an incriminating e-mail where a woman with the username "BunnyCakes310" sent a "sexy pic" to him and he replied with, "You're literally perfect. I'll call you tonight." Her friend gets the idea for June to check his blocked contacts since that's what they do on Unfiction. Honestly, what would they do without that show as a reference guide?
She finds 27 blocked contacts and there are messages from those people where each one is calling him a different name and it seems he was scamming them and taking their money. After doing some research, she finds out that Kevin Lin is indeed his real name and he was sent to Eastham Federal Penitentiary for 3 years and was released last year. June mentions this to Detective Park who already was aware this. They don't think he's conncected because "he's never been involved in a disappearance" and he's using his real name. Uh, he was the last known person they know she was with and there's a first time for everything! At least he tells her they are looking for him. Park tells her that all the scams he did were before he went to prison and he's never violated his parole.
June tries to get more information about "BunnyCakes" and goes to her Instagram (she uses the same username) and sees he real name is Rachel and she is an actress and a bartender. She sees a picture of the bar she works at and calls them, but they haven't seen her for two weeks. I would be a little concerned if I hadn't seen a co-worker in that long and they hadn't taken time off. The guy sounds more irritated than worried, but he admits it's not out of character for her. How the hell does this woman still have a job there if she's always bailing on them? Not surprisingly, June sees that Kevin has frequented this bar often.
There's also another place he's frequented, but it just gives coordinates. She figures out it is five hours from her home and the address is in Mountain Springs, Nevada and is listed as a "private residence." She is able to see the owner is "Jim W." and finds the number to call it. June tells this Jim guy she's calling about Kevin Lin and is pretty accusatory when she asks him why Kevin was at his house. We find out that "it's a re-entry program for ex-offenders" and he was paired with him. June puts "Jimmy" in her contacts. It really makes no sense why she would keep this random guy in her contacts, but it does come back later, so it's done for the plot. Also, I guess you want to cover all your bases and keep in contact with anyone who has had any contact with Kevin recently.
June realizes she doesn't know how her mom met Kevin (that seems surprising to me), so she searches her mom's name in Kevin's emails and this is how she finds out that they met through a dating app called Luvly where you can send video messages or written messages to the other person. Video messages seem like too much work to me, but this is coming from someone who hardly ever uses FaceTime. You have to make sure you look attractive, you might have to do several takes until you get your message just right, etc. But I get why they did it for the movie: it's just more cinematic for one thing. There are some long messages they leave for each other and having to read them wouldn't be the best way to get that across to the audience. June is able to read and watch all the videos they sent to each other. If I had a single parent, I sure wouldn't want to read/watch videos they were exchanging with someone they met on a dating site. That has got to be the most awkward thing. Luckily nothing is too scarring or scandalous! She sees this first started three months ago. Kevin sent her a video message asking who her favorite '80s band is on 10/23, then sends her a "just checking in" text on 10/25, and sends another video on 10/29 and admits a third message is lame. He sure is persistent! She does eventually send a message back and they strike up a conversation.
June goes through their messages. They start off light, but get serious as Grace tells him how difficult it can be to a mother and how she worries about June. We see a text in March where Grace asks if she can call Kevin because there's something she wants to talk about with him. The next day, we see a text where she tells him "thanks for listening last night" and she's "only ever told one other person about [her] past." and "this has to stay between [them]". Now this possibly couldn't have anything to do with her mysterious disappearance! Even though we have no idea (at this point) what she told him, it doesn't seem like the smartest idea to tell someone you just met something that's obviously very important. But I guess they're just trying to convey that she trusts him.
We see a video message from Kevin telling her about his past, but June already knows about that.
June looks up romantic destinations in Cartagena and finds the Walled City Love Lock Bridge which would make sense with the lock Kevin bought. She tells Javi about it and he finds a lock with their initials on it. He seems to find it in five seconds, but there's no way it was quick because there must be thousands of locks on the bridge. Wasn't this an Amazing Race task one season where someone from each team had to find a specific lock?
June finds the bridge's camera from the day her mom and Kevin were there. I still don't understand why they would keep that, but again, we need it for the movie. She sees Kevin propose to her mom on the bridge. If anyone proposed to me on a crowded bridge full of tourists, I would be so pissed. But everyone around them is clapping. I've never seen a public proposal (thank God), but I honestly could care less about two people I've never met getting engaged.
We get a huge lead when Agent Park calls June to tell her they found footage of her mom and Kevin being kidnapped in broad daylight by masked men who put them into a white van. Park thinks they just want money because they "flagged a withdrawal from [Grace's] bank to an encrypted third party account." Who kidnaps somebody in broad daylight? Though this is South America, I suppose. They received this footage from "an anonymous source."
Something tells June to go back to look at all the pictures Kevin's sent her and while scrolling through them, she notices she never actually sees her mom's face. All the photos are live, so when she activates ones of them, she sees the woman's face and it is definitely not her mom, but rather Rachel Page's (aka BunnyCake) face. She figures Kevin hired Rachel to impersonate her mom, but why?
The whole movies shifts and now the FBI believes Grace never left L.A. They think that whatever happened, happened on the drive to LAX. Kevin and Grace took an Uber to the airport, but Uber has no record of the trip and the car was using stolen plates. They're trying to find Kevin in Colombia because they know he's the one person who knows what's going on.
Rachel is found and she tells journalists that Kevin told her it was a reality show shot on an iPhone. (Yeah this all happens really quickly!) She says after the "kidnapping" scene she knew something was up, so she made a run for it. Uh, smart move! She cooperates with police and tells them when and where Kevin picked her up and when they check traffic cameras, they see her getting in the car, but Grace wasn't there.
Detective Park asks June if her mom has gone by any other names, but she tells him no. This is asked because it's been found out that Grace Allen is an alias and that her "real identity lies locked behind a court-ordered seal." June asks Heather (remember, she's her mom's lawyer) if she can do anything, but Heather tells her it would "take at least a week to get a judge to lift it" and adds that she knew nothing about this either.
This story is all over social media and everyone thinks that Grace staged this and ran away, making June upset and she goes on a rampage of down voting comments or reporting them. I don't even know why she's wasting her time reading these comments, but it's probably just supposed to represent, like no more than ten minutes (hopefully!).
She does some more sleuthing and discovers through Kevin's google history that he downloaded an encrypted text message program that have the messages disappear after they have been read. I like how the movie takes it time with June finding it, it does't happen in two seconds. She downloads it and types in Kevin's email and password, but the password doesn't work, but all she has to do is reset it. She sees that a message has been sent ten hours ago: "What did you tell June?" There is a reply from "NewUser": "I promise I didn't tell her anything. She still does't know."
June types a message to NewUser, "Who is this?", but before she sends it, she changes her mind and types, "Are you home?" Smart move since she's on Kevin's log-in and that would raise red flags. She gets a reply that says, "Still at work. Is something wrong?" June, as Kevin, tells the person that "he" lost "his" phone and needs the number. After June gets the number, she cross references it and -plot twist - the number matches the lawyer's! At first, I was sure the lawyer was behind it, but she's kind of the equivalent of the Debra Messing character from Searching and I don't think they would have the same archetype be the culprit. Also, we will find out it was definitely not Heather when June sneaks into her office (using the SmartWatch left at her party to be the camera for the audience). While there, she finds there are files being deleted from the computer, and, most disturbing of all, she finds Heather's body. She learns from the detective that "based on the autopsy", Heather was killed minutes before she arrived. They sure do move fast in this movie!
We see the camera pan back and now somebody is watching June on THEIR computer (creepy!) and all of her files she has up are on their computer, so somehow this unknown mystery person has a way of hacking into her account. The unknown person gets a message from Kevin telling the mystery person (well to us, I'm pretty sure Kevin knows who he's communicating with!) that he needs help getting out of Colombia and that he "planned all of this just so no one would suspect YOU" and "you couldn't have done this without me." Okay, so now it's confirmed that Kevin was in on this whole thing from the start. The mystery person don't care!
Kevin won't be long for our story as June watches live footage of the police capturing him in Colombia. Well, shooting him dead would be more accurate because that's what happens, even though he puts his hands up in surrender, so I don't know why they shot him.
Now that the last hope for finding Grace alive has faded, June is inconsolable, listening to voicemails from her mom as she cries. She realizes that her mom (as always) calls her "Junebug" at the start of every message and tries her mom's Google password again, this time with "Junebug" and it works. You think she would have tried that already because she was aware that her mom always calls her that, even though she hates it. I mean, it's honestly kind of dumb she didn't think of it before.
She sees her mom has one blocked user and it's from one year ago with a message titled, "Found you Grace". When June clicks to read it, the message says, "She deserves to know." She brings up Kevin's Google account and notices he also has had contact with this same person who's email is "VMyQe12" - that's gotta be the worst email in history, right? Anyway, she notices that the security cameras she saw from Kevin's email and that he bought the cameras for this person. She signs onto the site and sees the different angles of the security camera set up around some random house in the middle of nowhere, it seems. She recognizes a room as the one from the last video of her and her dad before he died.
This might be a good time to put up a spoiler waring. I would definitely recommend to watch the movie before reading any of this, but this is when we're about to go into huge spoiler territory so read at your own risk. MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!!!!!
At this moment "Jimmy" makes another appearance when he calls June, asking her if she's safe and if all the doors are locked. He tells her there's a lot to explain, but he doesn't know if anybody is listening and he doesn't know who to trust. This should be sending up huge red flags for her. She hears a car door slam and on the ring motion detector, she sees Jimmy (who told her it was him) coming up to her door. How the hell did he get there so fast? She tells him she's going to call the police, but he uncover his head and reveals it's...wait for it...her dad. I should mention that her dad's name is James, so he's just going by a nickname of his own name. This guy is not the most stealthy.
It was at this moment that I knew he was behind this whole thing and I was kicking myself for believing he was actually dead this whole time! Remember, when I first saw him in the first five minutes of the movie, I thought he was the one behind the whole thing, but after the movie told us he was dead, I just sort of accepted it, but all along I was right on who did it all along!
June still isn't sure if she should open the door. When I watched this movie a second time, Grace's command about not opening the door to strangers stuck out to me. I'm internally willing June to NOT open the door, but technically, this man is not a stranger to June as it is her own father, but she hasn't seen him since she was three or four, so how does she know if she can really trust him? (Spoiler alert (even though I've already put up the spoiler warning): she can't!)
From behind the door, he tells her she deserves to know what happened and this prompts her to open the door. Maybe she should have gotten a little more information before she let him in? But once he's inside, he tells her his side of the story: that when she was little, he and her mom fought all the time and she never let him take care of June. We also find out her real name is Sarah, so that explains her identity being locked behind a court-ordered seal. He tells June that she doesn't know what her mother is "capable of" and that "she lied to a judge to have [him] put in prison." He then makes the stupid mistake of revealing that he was in Eastham for 12 years and June is quick to put the pieces together and realizes that's where he met Kevin and she knows something fishy is going on. I do wonder if he hadn't mentioned where he was in prison, if she would have believed him. I would hope not! Even though he is her father, she doesn't really know him and shouldn't trust him over her mother. Yes, obviously her mother lied to her about him being dead, but we will soon get the explanation.
When June questions him being in Eastham, this is when he realizes he's made a mistake. Her FaceTime chimes a few seconds later and June can see it's her friend calling. They both pause for a a few seconds, then she runs to accept the call, but he is quicker and declines. He then takes a struggling June to his car and basically kidnaps her.
Now we get the real story: her dad was abusive to her mom and she was looking for ways to leave him. He was also a drug user and that was the reason for his bloody nose in the video. Grace found hard-core drugs in the closet and reported them to the police and that's how he ended up in prison. He threatens Grace that he will find her and pretty much implies that he will kill her. This is how Heather, who we find out is with domestic violence and family law, becomes involved in her case and is pretty much the only one who knows Grace's real backstory. As we know, Grace is her new identity and she and her daughter move states as a result of this. There are hints of Grace wanting to tell June the truth, but she can never seem to get through to her daughter. Also, that must have been what she told Kevin (who it turns out she couldn't trust at all!) over the phone while they were talking on that dating app.
So June ends up tied up in a chair in a room that she recognizes as the one from the last video of her and her dad. Obviously, we're watching everything through the security cameras that are set up around this property. James goes to a shed, where, not surprisingly, Grace is being held. After finding out he has June, she hits him with something (I think she was restrained, but was able to get free) and runs to the house where she finds June and unties her. She tells June to call the police but June says her phone is at home (which makes sense...don't think her kidnapper would allow her to have a phone!). She does still have her Apple Watch and uses it to contact Javi. (Random sidenote: I didn't capitalize either letter of "Apple Watch" and it automatically did it for me, of course it did cause I'm writing this on a MacBook!...also didn't capitalize MacBook and it automatically did it for me.) She asks Javi to go on her Instagram and find the picture of her and her dad when she was younger that was taken outside the house. He repeats the house numbers for her when she asks him for them. Just as she's about to tell him to call the police, the line is disconnected. Her dad comes in the room, asking her if she made any calls, but she denies doing so. He knows she has a watch because he saw her using it on the monitor. He wants June to go with him, but Grace begs him not to take her. After a few more attempts of this and Grace still getting in his way to take their daughter, he shoots her in the leg and she collapses against a wall, breaking a mirror. While James grabs June and starts restraining her, Grace gets up and stabs him in the neck with a piece of broken glass. He manages to stagger out of the room, but dies while trying to type "hospital nearby" at his computer.
I wonder what his plan was. I assume he planned to take June, hoping she would believe his story about her mom being the bad guy in the story he told her and make her believe that her mom left her while he killed her, but once June realized he was behind her mother's abduction, was he going to kill both of them?
I guess the message to call 911 didn't get across to Javi and June gets the idea to look into the camera (which she knows is spying on her own computer at home, where her phone is right next to) and says, "Siri, call 911". The inspiration comes from her mother who uses Siri for everything. The police come and they are rescued and June and her mother have a much better relationship now.
Their story is made into an episode for Unfiction and there's a cute moment where Grace tells June that she has friended Javi on Facebook.
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