Missed Call

I was very much looking forward to this film because I had absolutely loved Mapplebeck's short film 160 Characters, where a relationship is reconstructed through texts found on an old phone in her kitchen drawer. Staying with phones and this relationship, Missed Call sees Mapplebeck and her 14-year-old son planning how to get in touch with her son's father, who he only saw at age 2 and not since. It does this through direct interviews shot on the iphone, and it explores the parent and son challenge of connecting with someone who long since stopped connecting with them.

It is a frustrating film, although I suspect my love of 160 Characters works against me on this one. At its core it is engaging, honest, and emotional. However the manner in which it is shot made me feel like it was being done for the camera, at least in part. This is ironic as I read that the teenager was more natural with a phone pointed at him than cameras etc, and that it got more natural interactions, but still it always felt like the camera was part of the conversation, not just capturing it. The phone (or technology generally) as a character is here, as is the fast edits from 160 Characters - another thing I struggled with, for two reasons. The first was that 160 was wholly based on phones, so it made sense; in Missed Call aside from the use of text to make that initial contact, there is no other big reason for it to take this approach.

The second reason is that the approach constantly reminds me of 160, which is a far better film. All that said, there is still enough of personal and emotional content in here to make it engaging; Victoria's son is honest and likeable, and neither him nor his mother seem phased by letting such personal moments play out in this short film. At times it did feel a little uneasy that these moments were being done on camera - but to be fair, I think this is more about me than the film, as I'm not a big consumer of "to-camera" stuff on YouTube, Snapchat, Instastories or any of that stuff. For those for whom that is the norm, probably this small niggle doesn't exist.

In summary, it is a solid film with an emotional core, and I found it frustrating that I did not like it more than I did.

This wasn't boring to me, but why does the boy in the Dick Lee fictional movie, Wonder Boy, with burpee actor, Richard Herrera, look like the same boy in this documentary about looking for one's own father? I just wanted to know how many burpees to do to have a perfect body, and now it's like I'm investigating a certain stalking crime from Japan to London. Where is the boy's father? In Japan? Or is he Richard Herrera doing burpees in London? He looks like the boy.