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.

Seedy private investigator Michael Shannon (as John Rosow) is hired to find missing husband Frank Wood (as Harold Fullmer). He doesn't hold his liquor as well as the detectives he emulates, but Mr. Shannon manages to find a way in the dark. As you might expect, he has second thoughts about his assignment, and finds himself as well. This is a nicely done "film festival" type - involving but not necessarily entertaining - which does not reflect the films it recalls (Humphrey Bogart is mentioned in the script). Writer/director Noah Buschel and Shannon are fine, but you can always see them working.****** The Missing Person (1/16/09) Noah Buschel ~ Michael Shannon, Frank Wood, Amy Ryan, John Ventimiglia

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 ****

What director Noah Buschel has concocted with "The Missing Person" is to take a genre and fine tune it with touches that, while original, ultimately pay homage to, and even nourish, noir.What he has done,too, is set up any number of movies he might want to make with the masterly Michael Shannon as private eye John Rosow; and re-recruit, too, the saucily effective Amy Ryan.This moody artwork about finding a mysteriously but voluntary missing person has all sorts of twists and turns, none predictable, as it weaves its way through the dark.That Shannon plays roles Bogart feasted on is all too true. but it is the rugged countenance of Mitchum that he more facilely brings to mind. Shannon,so powerful in the film "Revolutionary Road" and then HBO's raunchy and real "Boardwalk Empire" series, and yet again in the rock film "The Runaways," is special, indeed. His screen effect is compelling,mesmerizing.All we need now is a script and the word "Action!"