Missing (2023) Ending Explained

We discuss the ending of the 2023 movie Missing, which will contain spoilers.

Missing is a “screenlife” movie with “visual storytelling where all the events are shown on a computer, tablet or smartphone screen” that has become popular over the past decade because of the expansion of 21st-century technology. The story follows an 18-year-old high school student, June (Storm Reid). The teenager lives with her mother, Grace (Nia Long). June lives with the haunting memories of her father dying of cancer when she was a small child. (She watches a video of him playing with her and then suddenly has a nosebleed). She ruminates on that moment daily, so much so she is so worried about losing another parent, evidenced by how she saves almost any voicemail from her mother, no matter how small.

What happens in the movie Missing?

However, Grace is moving on with her life. She is now dating Kevin (Kenneth Leung), who is eager to win June’s approval and takes her mother to Columbia for a vacation. (So, what possibly could go wrong in a country that experiences almost one company for every 100,000 people?). However, the holiday takes place over Father’s Day, another reminder of what she never had and lost. Grace is overprotective of her and is now recognized by the state as an adult. She transfers 350 dollars into her account for emergencies while she is gone. The single mother also has her best friend and attorney, Heather (Amy Landecker), who checks in on her.

June throws a party with her friends over the weekend. She then goes to pick up her mother at the airport, but Grace and Kevin do not arrive. They begin to reach out to the FBI and talk to an agent assigned to the case (Daniel Henney), and things move slowly because of international red tape. June wants to cut past all that, so she hires a local handyman (Joaquim de Almeida) for eight dollars an hour to head to the hotel to review the footage.

Also, June begins to suspect Kevin is not who he says he is by hacking his Gmail accounts. (She could not hack into her mother’s accounts). She finds that he has a criminal record and several aliases that he used to defraud women. June reaches out to a local man named Jimmy, a pastor at a church who is in charge of rehabbing paroled convicts. He backs Kevin and says what he and June had was real. June digs further and finds his dating profile and messages between them, backing Jimmy’s claims. They both come clean about their past, with Kevin telling her about his history, but shocking Grace hints she also has secrets. June finds footage of them through live cam websites. The FBI sends her a video of the couple being kidnapped at gunpoint.

However, the film’s first big shocking twist is that of all the footage June and the FBI have seen, the woman with Kevin is not Grace! A woman named Rachel claims he hired her to be an actress on a reality show. June then becomes suspicious of Heather’s despondent behavior. When she investigates the lawyer at her office, she finds her computer is being erased and her dead body in the adjoining room. Later, June is sent a video of Kevin being gunned down by Columbian authorities, leaving the trail for her mother cold.

That’s when things become even stranger for June as she finally hacks into her mother’s account by using her mom’s pet name for her, “Junebug,” as the password. There is information that her mother was harassed, and she bought a camera system for an old vacation home. That’s when she gets a call from Jimmy saying he has information about June’s mom. Except when he arrives at night after the cops leave the house during a dark and rainy night. Jimmy knocks on the door, takes his hood off, and reveals that he is June’s father! June also sees her mother on the video camera inside the home. (June knows the house, it’s where the video was shot of June and her father).

It turns out Jimmy went to prison for selling drugs, and Grace left him because of his use. She took June and called the cops, telling them about the drugs she found in the closet. He went away for twelve years and met Kevin in prison. Heather was the lawyer that helped Grace relocate and change her name. Jimmy killed Heather, and when Kevin was killed in Columbia (my guess is he gave an anonymous call to authorities of his location), he was home-free. He kidnaps Grace and takes her back to that home. However, where is Grace, and how does June locate her mom? It turns out Jimmy locked her away in the garage of their old vacation home.

What happens at the end of Missing?

The 2023 movie Missing ends with Jimmy putting June and Grace in the same room and locking them in. Jimmy walks in, shoots Grace in the torso, and grabs June, who fights him off and stabs him in the neck with a broken glass shattered by the bullet that went straight through Grace. While Jimmy tries to google the nearest hospital, June asks “Siri” to call 911 through the security camera she was monitoring from her home. Her cell phone was still on the desk at her house.

A few months pass and June is now in college. We see on the computer that June is watching what happened to her at home — with a Netflix true crime series based on her own experience called Unfiction. Grace texts June that she loves her. Unlike at the film’s beginning, June reciprocates and texts back that she also loves her.

What did you think of the ending of the 2023 movie Missing? Comment below.

Missing (2023) Ending Explained – how does June find her mom?