A placid adventure

MISSING Direction: Mukul Abhyankar Actors: Manoj Bajpayee, Tabu, Annu Kapoor Rating: ★★

Two strangers meet on a cruise and end up in each other’s arms. Then the woman’s daughter goes missing. Docking in a foreign land, Sushant Dubey (Manoj Bajpayee) and Aparna (Tabu) appeal to the Mauritian police for help, where an investigation is launched, headed by a gentlemanly cop named Ram Khilawan Budhu (Annu Kapoor).

As the policemen try to find the missing girl, though, it turns out the couple has been lying to them about a growing list of things, and it’s completely unclear why.

The plot stumbles here, and some of the action only begins to make sense as the film progresses. Bajpayee and Tabu struggle to find their feet. But what hurts Missing most is that it never achieves a sense of urgency.

This is a story set over the space of a few hours. It opens at a dockyard and closes at a hotel.

After a while, two characters begin to feel insufficient to hold your attention. The cop helps liven things up; the editing by Shree Narayan Singh helps too.

Cinematographer Sudeep Chatterjee tries his best to create momentum, but silhouettes and hard-edged photography need subjects, preferably gripping ones.

At 120 minutes, Missing isn’t exactly an edge-of-the-seat thriller, but it will hold your interest on a lazy afternoon.