The Notorious 2011 Shocker Megan is Missing is a Profoundly Disturbing Cinematic Experience
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch and then write about in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Because I have not completely lost faith in humanity, I like to think that most people find images of the physical, sexual, or verbal abuse of children deeply disturbing. If you find depictions of the physical and sexual abuse of children anything other than disturbing, then there is something deeply wrong with you.
But I am unusually sensitive to onscreen portrayals of the abuse of children. It disturbs me on a visceral level and gets under my skin. If I have a choice between watching something involving the horrific abuse of children or something fun or at least not demoralizing, I’m going to go with the child abuse-free option every time.
So when I saw that one of the most recent Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 choices was the notorious 2011 found footage/screen life shocker Megan is Missing, I was the opposite of enthused. It looked like the kind of sordid, adolescence-based sensationalism that I stay away from for the sake of my fragile sanity.
I’m lucky in that most of the movies chosen for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 are movies that patrons think I will enjoy un-ironically or have a blast mocking. If I were to enjoy Megan is Missing on any level, however, that would make me a bad person who law enforcement should keep a close eye on.
Megan is Missing is not supposed to be fun. Writer and director Michael Goi designed the low-budget traumatizer as a wake-up call to parents about the dangers of allowing kids unfettered access to an internet overflowing with predators, pedophiles, and deviants.
Yet it was those darn kids on TikTok who made Megan is Missing happen by posting particularly disturbing clips and images, then inquiring how and why a movie so full of violence against fourteen-year-old girls should exist and be accessible to anyone with an Amazon account and three dollars and ninety-nine cents.
Megan is Missing is a movie that I had to force myself to see because its subject matter could not be less appealing or suited to my tastes. However, I also have an obligation to patrons and want to tackle new choices in a timely fashion, so I subjected myself to Megan is Missing and was horrified but not surprised to discover that it is every bit as disturbing as its reputation would suggest.
Choi’s Nightmare Fuel chronicles the tragic online lives and deaths of fourteen-year-old best friends Megan Stewart (Rachel Quinn) and Amy Herman (Amber Perkins). They’re a complementary set of opposites.
Megan is a smart but self-destructive party girl who responds to being molested by acting out and becoming hyper-sexual and sensation-seeking. Amy, in sharp contrast, is a virginal good girl who is hated by Megan’s friends for being a prude. In Megan is Missing’s seedy world, that means not being willing to exchange sexual favors for drugs.
Megan is Missing prominently features a party scene where Megan does just that to a teenage drug dealer who, astonishingly, is not the most loathsome character in the movie because he has such fierce competition. Megan is Missing is like Kids in its portrayal of the world of early adolescence as a sexed-up horror show beyond parental imagination yet lacks the artistry that Larry Clark brought to Kids. Megan is Missing is designed to make parents want to take away their children’s cell phones and computers to save them from experiencing the horrors at the film’s rancid, rotten core.
Things start out sordid but become truly bleak with the introduction of Josh (Dean Waite), a predator of Satanic evil who takes an unfortunate interest in Megan and knows just what to say.
Megan is naive enough to make plans to meet up with her sketchy online suitor in real life. It proves to be the biggest single mistake in a short but eventful lifetime full of them.
Megan goes missing, and the film’s perpetually wavering tone becomes incongruously big and broad once the media latches onto the story and sensationalizes it with reenactments whose broad cartoonishness deviates greatly from the grubby, unadorned realism of the rest of the film.
Depending on the scene, Megan is Missing alternately recalls the hokey, tween-focused sitcoms of Disney Jr. and snuff films. Choi aspires to a documentary-like verisimilitude but is sabotaged by an inexperienced cast that hits all kinds of bum notes.
That’s the tricky thing about Megan is Missing. It will be raw and real and poignant one moment and glaringly fake the next.
The media coverage in Megan is Missing seems to belong in a different, broader, and more satirical movie. It feels out of place here.
Megan is Missing gets grimmer and grimmer until it’s reached a point where it cannot be any more bleak or depressing. The final twenty minutes or so, in particular, are an endurance test with an unconscionable level of violence and sexual brutality.
Part of what makes Megan is Missing so uniquely unnerving is that its very young characters were played by unknowns roughly the same age as the characters they’re playing. Choi made sure that the parents of the lead actresses were on hand during filming to make things as non-traumatic as possible. Yet I cannot envision a universe where a literal child acting in a grungily realistic movie where they’re tortured and sexually assaulted wouldn’t be deeply traumatized by the experience.
I was mildly traumatized by Megan is Missing’s ending, and I am a forty-eight-year-old man who has seen thousands of films. I can only imagine what a difficult experience it must have been for the poor children forced to see things no one should, particularly at that age.
I have deep reservations about children acting under any circumstances. It’s almost invariably a recipe for unhappiness and dysfunction. I’d rather have the stars of Megan Is Missing be played by young-looking thirty-year-olds or realized through the magic of CGI than do what the movie does to its stars.
Megan is Missing is based on “actual events” and was endorsed by activist Mark Klaas of the KlaasKids Foundation. It’s horrifying that abuse like this exists, but that doesn’t mean that I need to see it, nor does it excuse the film’s ugly sensationalism.
I’m glad that I forced myself to see and write about Megan is Missing because now I can check it off my Patch Adams clipboard and return to my habit of avoiding movies involving the sexual abuse of children. It’s probably kept me from watching some great, albeit difficult, movies, but suffering through Megan is Missing made me feel like I had the right idea all along.
Nathan needs teeth that work, and his dental plan doesn't cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
Did you enjoy this article? Then consider becoming a patron here