Missing You Review: Where One Cop Has Too Many Mysteries to Solve

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)

Detective Kat Donovan has two mysteries she’s been struggling to solve for over ten years –

Why the criminal who confessed to murdering her father won’t reveal who ordered the killing or what the motive is.Why her fiance Josh, who was the love of her life, ghosted her completely without an explanation, soon after her father’s death.

Directed by Nimer Rashed and Isher Sahota, the Netflix limited series Missing You is based on a book by Harlan Coben and spans five episodes. Rosalind Eleazar plays protagonist Kat Donovan, a determined officer racing against time to get answers from her father’s killer, who is gravely ill and near death. Meanwhile, her world is upended when her ex-boyfriend – who had vanished without a trace (physical or digital) – appears on a dating app. Kat Donovan suddenly has several missing people to find: her father’s real killer, her ghost of an ex, and two other people who’ve gone missing.

As a viewer, the first thing you wonder is “what if the ex had something to do with the dad’s death?”. But the first few episodes establish Josh as a loving ex, a total hit with Kat’s parents, so there seems to be very little motive for him to murder the dad. Although some of the co-incidences in the series feel contrived, and the dialogues are very mundane. But thankfully, unlike most thriller that are annoying dark in color palette, “Missing You” sticks to what looks like natural lighting and an engaging amount of shades. Yeah, nothing noir, or ‘artsy’ about this one, and I am fine with that.

Rosalind Eleazar is the best bit about “Missing You”, from a tough detective in the present, to an vulnerable softie completely smitten with her man in romantic flashbacks, she displays the various layers of Kat’s character with ease. The worst thing about “Missing You” is how almost every character in the series seems to be either hiding things from Kat or outright lying to her face. For a grown, serious, hardworking, smart woman, Kat is often treated like a lost girl by people in her life and it’s outrageously frustrating to watch. “We wanted to protect you,” is everybody’s favorite excuse. The lady is a cop, she can do the protecting!

Nobody else in the cast stands out, although Richard Armitage, who has a small role as Kat’s senior at work, immediately seemed like a red-flag, since he was the bad guy in “Fool Me Once” too. For the uninitiated, “Fool Me Once” is also a eight-episode Netflix series (made by the same creators), and is a Harlan Coben thriller. The only reason I am rating “Missing You” a little higher than “Fool Me Once” was because it’s shorter, crisper, and doesn’t waste too much time on secondary characters. Those looking for a quick thriller, and don’t it being cookie-cutter, might find “Missing You” to be adequately entertaining.

Rating: 6 on 10. Watch the series on Netflix.

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