‘I would never hurt you, Megan...’
Despite garnering a fair amount of controversy upon its release, Megan is Missing passed me by when it came out in 2011. After going viral on TikTok in recent years, the film has tumbled back into the public consciousness. Having now watched it, the fact that this film went viral over a decade after it was initially released says something particularly depressing about where we are as a species right now…
One of the first ‘screenlife’ films (a natural progression from found footage in which the film is partly or completely viewed through computer screens – Unfriended, Host, Searching, etc), Megan is Missing introduces us to extroverted teenager Megan Stewart (Rachel Quinn) and her more reserved best friend, Amy (Amber Perkins), and then, as you can imagine, Megan goes missing.
Written and directed by frequent Ryan Murphy collaborator Michael Goi, Megan is Missing was marketed as an educational film intended to warn parents about the dangers of the internet. Whether intended or not, the film straddles the line between cautionary tale and outright exploitation in a way that is often uncomfortable. Even if we believe Choi’s claim that the film was made purely as a warning to parents, that doesn’t change the fact that the execution of it is needlessly distasteful. While it is the film’s incredibly grim final act that drew much of the criticism, there are a lot of gratuitously explicit conversations between teenage actors playing even younger teenage characters that add little to the plot beyond being shocking for the sake of it. It is perhaps unsurprising that Goi cut his teeth working with Murphy, a man who has made a career out of sensationalising violence with little narrative justification, and it is also unsurprising that he probably isn’t the right person to deal with this material (there is a strong argument that no filmmaker could justify this particular material). The fact that many of the acts of violence depicted here are based on real cases of torture and abduction only muddies the waters further. I’m not sure this film should exist. And I’m even less sure that anyone should be watching it.
As someone who has in the past sought out the most shocking and depraved films that the horror genre has to offer, it is perhaps hypocritical of me to condemn this film too harshly, there is an argument that evil is part of the human condition and so is suffering, and by depicting both in such a visceral way, Goi is merely holding a mirror up to the darker elements of society and forcing us to confront them. There is also an argument, however, a stronger argument in my opinion, that there are ways to achieve that without using inexperienced teenage actors playing out truly unspeakable scenarios to make that point. As an aside, the young cast do a decent job with the material they have been given, and there are moments of visual innovation here, but the sheer grotesqueness of the plot steamrollers everything else to the point of obsolescence.
Megan is Missing is an upsetting, disturbing and seemingly gleefully malevolent film at times. While its message of applying caution when speaking to strangers online may have been relevant in 2011 (I’d argue online safety was already a fairly well-understood issue even then), it’s certainly not necessary now. Therefore, this strange and nasty film should be left where it belongs – back in 2011. As I said about the similarly distressing film, The Girl Next Door, I wish I hadn’t watched it.
