In 2023, a thriller came out that took the screenlife genre to a whole new level. Missing tells the twisty story of a teenager tracking down her mother using all the powers of the internet. Every frame of the movie is packed with app interfaces and potential clues — some of which tie into the creative team’s earlier films, Searching and Run. Each standalone story is loaded with Easter eggs that reveal a shared universe.
Co-writer and producer Sev Ohanian obviously loves mysteries, but he also can’t help spoiling them. Missing, Searching, and Run each contain glimpses of the solutions to their own enigmas, as well as proof of how their stories interlock. Eagle-eyed fans can assemble Ohanian’s tantalizing puzzle, and perhaps uncover hints of what the future holds for this clever creator and his team.
Searching Forms the Foundation of a Shared Universe
In 2018, Sev Ohanian and Aneesh Chaganty dropped an innovative thriller in the “screenlife” subgenre: a found footage-like style that plays out on device screens. In Searching, David (John Cho) is a widower turned web sleuth hunting for his missing teen daughter Margot (Michelle La). He follows her trail online, realizing he hardly knows his own child, while social media users accuse him of murder.
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The Trilogy’s Tricky Credits |
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The follow-up films Run (2020) and Missing (2023) also involve a girl and her single parent learning shocking secrets about one another, but in the latter movies, the child is the detective. In Run, chronically ill teen Chloe (Kiera Allen) realizes that her mother Diane (Sarah Paulson) is poisoning her to keep her housebound. This discovery reveals that Diane is not who she claims — and neither is Chloe.
In Missing, news chyrons mention a Hollywood producer murdering his editors — an in-joke between Ohanian, Merrick and Johnson.
Though Run only seems thematically connected to Searching, Missing ties them together. When Grace (Nia Long) disappears, her daughter June (Storm Reid) uses the internet to find her — and is horrified to see social media framing Grace as a dangerous con artist. Meanwhile, Missing’s many DMs, emails, hashtags and clickbait articles show that Chloe and Margot’s stories have become trending topics in June’s world.
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Missing co-creator Will Merrick told The Hollywood Reporter how their trilogy simultaneously critiqued the problematic true crime trend and used TikTok videos and clickbait articles to link the three films.
It was always something we wanted to do, especially since (Missing) covers true crime culture and the idea of a true crime frenzy even more than the first one does. So it just seemed like an obvious way to tie Searching in, and it did exist from the original treatment.
While the movies are clearly connected by their themes and basic structures, they also relate through a web of tiny details only the most intrepid fans will spot. Some of these include fourth wall-smashing spoilers producer Sev Ohanian sends to the protagonists.
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Each Film Contains a Secret Spoiler — and a Sci-Fi Subplot
Halfway through Searching, David overlooks an email from a familiar-sounding sender. Sev Ohanian’s message explains that Margot has actually been catfished, leading to her disappearance. Ohanian pulls the same stunt in Missing, emailing June a warning that her mother is keeping secrets. Ohanian doesn’t email Diane in Run, but she receives a message explaining that her traumatic past is the cause of her abusive behavior.
Sev Ohanian obviously delights in hiding Easter eggs throughout his films, though he told Collider that his team observes strict rules about how they are deployed.
(We) make sure we reward rewatchability…that any time you pause the movie, you might see an entire new story on the side that you never imagined. So for us, one of the big dos [sic] is to make sure that Easter eggs are meaningful.
Scores of characters reappear throughout the trilogy. A social media comment in Missing states that the nurse who helped Run’s Chloe is the twin sister of Margot’s mother from Searching (both roles are played by Sara Sohn). In Searching and Missing, the same gossipy teens comment on Margot and Grace’s disappearances. An exhaustive list of every reappearing character would take a team of sleuths to sort out.
In Missing, June discovers that a woman with the username Bunnycake has vanished. When she says “Bunnycake is missing,” it is a likely reference to the 1965 mystery Bunny Lake Is Missing, in which a woman cannot prove that her missing daughter really exists.
The most interesting connection between Searching, Run, and Missing is one that has no explanation — yet. Sharp-eyed viewers will spot hints of an alien invasion unfolding in the background, including electromagnetic phenomena, weather anomalies, and a “green angel” rescuing endangered humans. Merrick and Johnson have been asked what it all means, but they have only stated that fans will have to wait on Sev Ohanian for the answer.
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Searching
- Release Date
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August 24, 2018
- Runtime
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104minutes
- Director
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Aneesh Chaganty
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Run
- Release Date
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November 20, 2020
- Runtime
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90 Minutes
- Director
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Aneesh Chaganty
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