Congratulations!

Finally, something refreshingly unique, utterly insane, deer-in-the-headlights watchable and worthy of the bottle of wine consumed while viewing. Moments in the film are a witty nod to the absurd behavior that occurs in our society frequently when select public service workers and reporters tend to treat investigations as one big "selfie" and end up performing for the public and on social media rather than executing their jobs based on gathering evidence, resisting tunnel vision, and reporting facts, not assumptions. RUSH said it best with the Limelight lyrics: All the world's indeed a stage And we are merely players Performers and portrayers Each another's audience Outside the gilded cage Living in the limelight The universal dream For those who wish to seem My favorite moment had to be when the detectives were putting up the age progression wall and spacing the progression photos hours and days apart. "Here he is when he went missing and now here is how our artist believes he looks now, 4 days later". Priceless. I need more movies like this in my life. And more wine. Always more wine.

If you think "Airplane!" is a screamingly funny movie, you might find this one amusing. This is a standard missing-person film with a very non-standard approach just as "Airplane!" is a standard air disaster film with a very non-standard approach. A 7-year-old boy goes missing. The police are called. They suspect he's still in the house. Instead of blanketing the neighborhood and surroundings with posters of the lost child, they blanket the house with posters. Literally. Ha, ha. Get it?

The search goes on for months, limited to the environs of the house. The police detectives move in and stay with the family, searching the house over and over again. And over, and over, and over. Ha, ha.

We saw this film at the Cinequest film festival in San Jose. The film was made in an Atlanta suburb, in the childhood home of the filmmaker while his parents were on vacation. It's crowd-funded. Ha, ha. Get it?

I started watching and couldn't believe how absolutely absurd this movie is. The more I watched the more I was hooked. It's terrific. No need to go into the details and story. You've already read that. This movie is a pleasure to watch if you like absurdity. I do. Hence my rating.

The film, to me, seemed unsure if it wanted to be an absurdist comedy (like, as others have mentioned, films like Airplane) or it wanted to be a sort of surrealistic drama (like a poorly-rendered, weak watercolor version of a Lynch film). It tended to hover somewhere in between. There were definitely some half-smirk laughs, but I can't say it ever was fully realized as a comedy. The subject matter alone made the comedy concept a little bit wince-worthy. Someone mentioned how funny it was when they used age-progression software to age the missing child 4 days, but when the detective used the same software to age him into old age and then death and then decay, it was decidedly (and seemingly intentionally) unfunny. The reaction on the officer's face made me think I was missing some critical element that I couldn't grasp. Was it a revelation that he believed the child was dead? Was it fear of his own mortality? Had the child remanifested as someone else who should have been familiar? Did it mean nothing? There were other scenes that made me feel there was supposed to be some great meaning or purpose but either the filmmakers failed to convey them, I was too stupid to see them, or they never really existed. The film continued beyond its natural ending and by the time the credits rolled I could only say "Wait...what?"

Mostly I feel like I should have liked this more than I did. Or I wanted to like it more. Or something. Because there is almost something here, or maybe I imagined it. I give it five stars for the quality of some of the scenes, the acting, and my desperate belief that there was more there than met the eye.

What starts off as a traditional detective / missing child procedural quickly escalates into an absurd, meta, wildly entertaining story about finding oneself. The cast is great, humor on point, production design surprisingly engaging, and the plot stays confined to the main house without losing interest or momentum -- which is always impressive for any one-location, low budget film. Would absolutely recommend to anyone looking for a unique, thought-provoking piece. I watched it on Tubi, but it's also available on Fawesome - so you should check it out whenever you have a sec, and recommend to your loved ones!