Onde Está Megan?

I wasted $3.99 renting this movie because of the reactions of Gen Z on tiktok. This is by far the worst movie I have ever seen.

This movie was nothing at all what I had expected or hoped it would be. The first three-fourths of the movie is basically just teenage girls goofing around, trash talking and being teens. However, I will say that the last quarter turned out to take a more interesting twist, however, it hardly made up for suffering through the first three quarters.

You should take heed that there is a lot of explicit sexual dialogue in the movie, which I sort of found inappropriate and too much, especially coming from girls who were only 14 years old.

The story is about a teenage girl who meets a stranger on the Internet, and then ends up missing. The whole community is in an uproar, searching everywhere for the missing teen. Then her best friend goes missing as well, and no one knows who is behind the ghastly abductions.

Acting-wise, then "Megan is Missing" doesn't really hold anything overly impressive. The performances put on here are adequate, but not memorable. And I was mostly just offended and outraged at the way the teenagers behaved and talked, more than I had feelings or sympathy for them. So on my account, the movie failed to properly deliver its messages. And it was only the more gruesome events in the last quarter of the movie that managed to fully turn out to be interesting in my opinion.

"Megan is Missing" is the type of movie that you watch once, and then never again. For a movie that is based on real events, then it turned out to be a rather one-dimensional and non-emotional portrayal of the events.

I just watched Megan is Missing finally and I do not understand the level of hate this movie gets. Going to talk about it. Short answer: It's not for everyone but no horror is. But it does have a very underappreciated place in horror.

Exploitation films are films designed to make you feel bad and somewhat mock the genre they exist within. Even movies that are incredibly bleak (like this) tend to tell their story in an entertaining way. They still have a perspective and a purpose.

This movie doesn't.

It's fascinating in how that is portrayed. Found footage films, despite their nature, still always feel like a director's hand is involved. They're still guiding you through the story they want to tell in a specific way. Megan is Missing doesn't do that. A lot like the August Underground series, which is also grossly underappreciated, or the Slaughtered Vomit Dolls series..it's not trying to tell you a story necessarily. It's presenting a story to you in a very dry, perspectiveless, factual way. If this were real and you were someone forced to comb through actual footage, it would be like this. Not neatly spliced together like a traditional film but instead just be a series of plain events that on their own are honestly boring. But together it paints a much grimmer, bleaker, realistic picture for you because it doesn't tell you to feel any one way. A horror movie that doesn't force your hand to root for the villain or the victim. It just exists. This movie gets shot down a lot by people saying it's hollow and it's disturbing for the sake of being disturbing. You are 100% correct. It is. It's designed to be. This is a subgenre horror and the exploitation subgenre of horror particularly that is told in this way. It's also a time capsule of this era of history. I know people joke "internet bad" when talking about this movie but think about the nature of the internet in the mid 2000s to 2010. This movie takes place in 2007 and as someone who was on the internet in 2007..yea..this really mirrors what high schoolers can be exposed to online in that era of the internet. You have to understand this story in the context of that time which just adds to a sense of realism.

Now, would I recommend this movie? No. Unless you're like me and you happen to enjoy this kind of film making for the sake of it, then sure. But I won't call a genius film. You can have a disturbing and bleak slice-of-life kind of story and still have a traditionally entertaining story (A Serbian Film, Unfriended, Raise the Red Lantern, and Eden lake are all wonderful examples of this). But if you happen to enjoy August Underground or Slaughtered Vomit Dolls in terms of that story telling style, this is may be worth it for you. It's not gorey like those two it's more "baby's first introduction to this kind of film making" but it's a valid entry on that list. It could have been more impactful in a short story format but..only in the long format can you have 10 minutes of a guy digging a hole uninterrupted. That is part of the impact of the film. It's dry and mundane. Real life is far more horrific than story based horror. Megan is Missing is a prime example of that.

Where on EARTH do you start.

First, I'm not an apologist for abuse - I'm a therapist who works, every day, with abuse and trauma. So I really GET an attempt to explore this issue - and warn - from the victim's point of view.

And, to be fair, filming this in 8 days? Remarkable.

But...

I'm left with all kinds of icky feelings. True, Megan is pretty unbearable. She's become a bit slutty, offering what she CAN offer to boys because she can - because it doesn't matter that much (enough) to her, and that first harrowing trivial hour makes it clear what made her life, her body, less important to her than it should have been.

And Amy? Well, she's annoying, and a bit too squeaky clean, but this is annoyingly tangled up with her own self image, when in fact it's Megan's self image that is really more impaired.

The artifice of the whole film being webcam, 'phone and video is clever. Clever as in cheap, and amateurish, which works.

But that last 22 minutes. Well. Sadly, it's better shot than the previous hour, it's boring in places, (digging is NOT good cinema), and, all in all, it left me, (leaves me), feeling hollow, and empty.

There is a claim, at the start of the film, that this is based on a true story, but I've looked, hard, and can't find any proof.

There's a terribly upsetting "Every day 2000 parents say..." about abduction. Gleaned from the Klass site. But on the very next line on the Klass site, this number is diminished, and also made less clear (ie. NOT juvenile).

I don't know. I don't want to damn this film, and I don't want to pretend abuse isn't a terrible thing. It's just that my sense is, somewhere, the director got lost, and the producers didn't say so.

I admire that this is being done - ie an attempt to raise the issue. AND that the film was clearly made on a shoestring, in 8 days. But 22 year old actresses just don't (can't) look 13, and simply because abused girls don't LOOK like they have any depth doesn't mean they don't HAVE any depth.

This isn't a complete damning of this film. 'Enjoy' would be wrong, but I watched it, at least. It's just - I don't know... It could have been so much better, and it could STILL have been filmed in 8 days.

At first, I was upset. I mean, this movie was NOT what I expected. I thought I was watching a drama feature, something about the consequences of a situation in which a child gets involved with a stranger online… the consequences on the family, the friends… but no. Instead, I get a movie that shows me the direct consequences of such events on the children themselves. And the images I saw were gruesome and scary and so upsetting that I had to stop the movie 10 minutes before the end. And then I couldn't sleep. And I was angry! Because I felt cheated by the filmmaker for putting his movie under "drama" and I kept thinking that If I had known the extent of the horrors he was about to show me, I would have NEVER watched his movie. Never.

But I couldn't stop thinking about it. And so I did a little research and ended on the filmmaker's website in which he explains what he meant to say. And I read that letter written to him by the father of a child that was murdered by a sexual predator… and somehow it all started to make sense. Then throughout the day I told my dad and two of my friends about the movie. Telling them what I saw and how it made me feel, but also telling them about the filmmaker's statement and from this ensued three long conversations about the dangers of the numerous information and communication technologies that we use and take for granted and how they changed the way children (and people) relate to one another. We spoke about how scary it was to realize that your child isn't safe even if he's in the comfort of his own home. And it made me realize the importance of having only one computer (as the filmmaker suggests) in the common room of the house as opposed to having one in each bedroom.

My mom has been thinking of getting my 14 years old stepsister her own computer and I think I'm going to tell her about the movie. About what it made me think about. And why I would advise her against it.

It's funny because it makes me think of one of my favourite movies, Shion Sono's "Suicide Club" that sort of exposes the dangers and effects of information and communication technologies but in a much more "metaphorical" way. "Megan Is Missing" is not like "Suicide Club". It's brutal and painful and crude and completely uncensored. But maybe it is EXACTLY what we needed in order to wake up and do something before it becomes too late.

And for this, I truly thank the filmmaker.