The Missing Person is a contemporary noir that plays with the classic genre conventions in a comic way, although without invalidating or trivialising the content (scenes where you may expect an escalation of suspense often intentionally end bathetically as convention meets the real world). Private Detective Rosow is a Chicago-based private detective originally from New York who receives a short notice commission to tail a man and a boy cross country. He's an alcoholic and clinically depressed, but he still has some level of ability to achieve his task. "Missing Person" on a surface level refers to the guy Rosow is tailing, but also is about Rosow being missing in an existential way, someone for whom family and community have become concepts only. The bathos allows you to connect in a deeper way with his state, by challenging your familiarity. What's shocking about modern society is how the dissolution of traditional social structures, and omnipresent material convenience has led to so many "missing" people.Fundamentally The Missing Person is an image driven movie, the shot I liked best was a shot at night in the dining cart of the train to California, a cupola of light surrounded by thick darkness, the characters hurtling in cheap comfort through vast emptiness. The image that is iconic (or would be if anyone had watched the movie on release) is of Rosow in the dark with his day-glo glasses. I think from reading about the movie, many reviewers didn't get that it was a movie where much effort had been made on the visuals; you need to stick with it and carry on inspecting it to realise the contrary. At the start, Buschel uses the most purely functional credits anyone could imagine, they look like the yellow writing you get in PowerPoint presentations (supposedly as yellow on blue is the easiest writing to read if you're dyslexic). America is shot just exactly how it is (one of very few movies that have reminded me of my trip to America), and it can be assumed that this means the shooting is amateurish. It's actually more of a statement at the start of the movie, this movie is going to look the opposite of a John Alton shot movie, it's going to be as unmannered as we the filmmakers can make it.

Can't tell you how hard I tried to like "The Missing Person". Right off the bat, you can see it is an imitation noir, an attempt to recall a bygone era in movies, and they got a down-at-the-heels, alcoholic 'private eye' to be the hero - and being a likable sort, you root for him. The color is not splashy but almost a sepia, two-tone effect that works well with the mood of the picture.However.As noted by several reviewers, it takes forever to get going but then maintains the same slow, plodding pace throughout the film. And the hero, played by Michael Shannon, severely underplays his part and seems to be in a stupor in some scenes, so sluggish does he appear. That may be what the director was looking for, but he is at times in danger of fading into the wallpaper and losing command of what are essentially his scenes. Lastly, too much plot explanation was saved for the final scenes and became almost too much to absorb; It makes you wonder if you got the gist of the story.I hope this was a learning experience for director Buschel and I applaud his effort and concept. I hope he makes more and better pictures. And I hope he is not offended by the fact that a highlight of the movie for me was Thelonious Monk's version of an old standard, "I Don't Stand A Ghost Of A Chance", played over the final credits. It was perfection, a haunting rendition played slowly and using very few fingers.

Michael Shannon is one of the finest new character actors working in films today; his performance here as a private investigator from New York, hired to trail a middle-aged man from Chicago to Los Angeles by train, is the centerpiece of "The Missing Person"...and is very nearly the entire show. Writer-director Noah Buschel was probably hoping to modernize the old private eye clichés (including booze, broads, and blaring saxophones on the soundtrack), but his movie doesn't really start cooking for at least a quarter of an hour into the proceedings. Buschel's pacing is deliberately slow, and Shannon's John Rosow is intentionally beleaguered and burnt-out, yet there's no reason to be so poky with this narrative (even Bogie livened up earlier on one of his cases). The film is well-produced and shot, though it runs the risk of losing viewers before it starts to take shape. Once it does, it becomes a rather fascinating throwback, its scenario seesawing between the old and new--like Philip Marlowe in the cell-phone era. **1/2 from ****

There is a user comment here that mentions this film as an attempt at classical noir. Not so. It is an art film with surface elements of the noir genre. Probably it would be better off playing at museum than movie theater. At any rate, if you like David Lynch and Robert Frank and Andy Warhol films-- you will love this movie. Michael Shannon delivers his best performance. Finally he is romantic, leading man. The music is amazing. And Joe Lovano shows up to blow sax. The golden, desaturated look fits perfectly with the depressed character and hungover feeling. The best scene has glow in the dark sunglasses in a dark trunk. I wont say anything else.