'The Missing' review: Engrossing search for a son long gone
James Nesbitt stars as Tony Hughes, Oliver Hunt as Oliver Hughes and Frances O'Connor as Emily Hughes in Starz' " The Missing." Credit: Company Television Production / Jules Heath
WHAT IT'S ABOUT In the summer of 2006, a British family -- Tony Hughes (James Nesbitt), along with his wife, Emily (Frances O'Connor), and their 5-year-old, Oliver (Oliver Hunt) -- is on holiday in France. Their car breaks down, and they are forced to find lodging in a nearby city until repairs are complete.
One night, Tony and Olly venture into a noisy outdoor bar -- a World Cup match is playing on the TV, and the crowd is drunk and boisterous. Tony suddenly loses sight of Olly, and the horror begins. He's been kidnapped. Famed inspector Julien Baptiste (Tchéky Karyo) arrives in the city, Châlons du Bois, to help. But no luck.
This eight-part drama -- a co-production of Starz and the BBC -- mostly follows events eight years after the kidnapping.
MY SAY The sudden disappearance of a child is the stuff of a parent's nightmares. But the stuff of an eight-part series that will drag viewers through an interminable wallow of horror and anxiety? That's the immediate blunt-force challenge of "The Missing," which it meets head-on. Kid disappears in a quaint French village, then the mother and father instantly descend into a dimly lit hell, where everything and every emotion disintegrates.
The flash forward -- eight years in the future, to present time -- arrives like a brace of warm and welcome air.
That's the key plot device that makes "The Missing" so watchable and, frankly, so tolerable. The first hour pivots between past and present -- a present in which the parents have moved on, in different directions. In that present, there is almost hope, and, better yet, there are clues. In the past, there is only despair.
Clearly, "The Missing" wants to evoke, or maybe even mimic, "Broadchurch" -- with that same portentous sense of dread threaded through average lives conveniently burdened with dark secrets that serve as hooks to pull you in more deeply.
Meanwhile, Nesbitt -- Bofur, in the "Hobbit" franchise -- forcibly conveys the sense of a man who can't stop moving, even to sleep, until he finds his son.
At least in the first hour -- sorry, the only one I sampled -- this feels like the kind of performance that just bought Starz a winner.
GRADE B+
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