She’s Missing is a 2019 drama about a woman whose best friend goes missing, putting her on a search across the desert, digging up secrets and encountering the violence of life on the road.
Heidi (Lucy Fry) and Jane (Eiza González) are dear friends isolated in a small desert town, each with passions and hopes for greater things. Heidi is grounded, happy with her job as a waitress at a family diner, despite its seemingly dead end future, while Jane has eyes on being the local rodeo queen, marrying a military man and flying off into her dreams. Strangely, things seems to fall into place for Jane though her sudden disappearance leaves Heidi in despair and then on a quest to find out what happened, leading into the desert where she finds only deeper mysteries.
I won’t deny that I’m drawn to little movies like director Alexandra McGuinness‘ latest effort, She’s Missing a small, personal encounter that, like many in the vein, steer purposefully clear of the anchors most studio films find themselves fearful of pulling up. It’s often deliberately passive, moments weighted down by ambiguous dialogue and lengthy passages that don’t immediately feel connected yet for those willing to let it be so, hook with genuine interest.
We learn that Jane, an outgoing, conventionally attractive young woman wants free of the shackles her small dusty town has ’round her soul, she a restless spirit that finds escape in a fast marriage to a soldier we only briefly meet (a stalled car on her wedding day an ominous sign). We also learn that women from around the area are disappearing, and that the public is losing interest in finding them. Such is the case when Jane becomes one of the lost, with Heidi the only one seemingly giving a damn in looking for clues.
What this becomes is less like the typical investigative drama and more about a troubled relationship, as Jane never really feels all that put together, splintering in the wake of her marriage, alone in a base house as her husband is deployed. By the time she goes missing, there’s are reasons aplenty on the table for why she might decide to bolt, but with girls already missing, there’s enough to wonder about the worst.
She’s Missing is a curious female-driven experience, that is loaded with darkness as Heidi goes on a sort of existential odyssey into the heart of madness that takes us to shadows in the desert. I won’t give away what that means or where she ends up, but I will say that the story isn’t what it at first appears. In fact, it is because of this, some may surely find its second act not as compelling as the first, the plot landing among a group of people that we’ve seen before, meeting none other than Josh Hartnett in a blurry sort of role that doesn’t quite elevate this as it feels it should. She’s Missing revels in its murkiness, glued together by its languid etherealism.
That said, I appreciate a lot about what McGuinness is doing, giving these two diverse women time to shape a kind of yin-yang-iness about the pair. Both González and Fry remain committed throughout and while the film refuses to go big with its drama, steadfastly holding to a resolute tone, it keeps enough momentum in its exploration to make it matter. It’s a challenge that many will not want to take, understandably so, but right up to its final highly interpretive shot, is a work by a filmmaker looking to skirt what you’re used to and push for something experimental. That alone deserves some credit.