500,000 people scored 8.5! The annual suspense masterpiece, the whole process is high-energy reversal, but unfortunately the theater can't see it

In 2018, there was a high-scoring suspense movie, "Network Lost".

The production cost of the film is only 1 million US dollars, but it won 75 million at the box office, which can be called the dark horse of the year.

Not only did the box office counterattack, but the film's reputation was so good that it exploded, with 500,000 people on the rating website scoring a high score of 8.5.

For a low-cost suspense movie, such a result can be described as a double harvest of box office word-of-mouth.

The reason why the film is so successful is that the film's unique shooting form, it is a "desktop movie".

The plot of the movie is not complicated, telling the story of a 16-year-old girl who mysteriously disappeared, and the father cracked the password of his daughter's social networking site through his daughter to find clues to launch a "human flesh search", the highlight is that the whole story takes place on a computer screen.

The film does not have bloody shots or mysterious narratives, but through various software on the computer screen, as well as text, audio, pictures to video and even surveillance video, etc., it weaves a confusing suspense story line.

The process of watching this movie, like the protagonist in the film, operates the computer software, and there is an immersive puzzle solving pleasure.

After the great success of "Network Lost", the sequel was naturally put on the agenda, and after five years, this "Network Lost 2" was waited for.

As a sequel to a suspense movie, the film maintains the high reputation of the previous work, with a current rating of 8.4, and the creative team once again uses the form of a "desktop movie" to tell the audience a thrilling, layer-by-layer reversal suspense story.

In this issue of "New Film Detoxification", let's talk about this latest suspense movie -

"Lost in the Internet 2"

Missing (2023)

In fact, this set of movies is not the first of the "desktop movies", and there has been a similar theme and style of the "Unfriend" series.

But the success of "Lost in the Internet" is inseparable from the credit of director Anish Chaganty, the Indian-American director who once worked at Google and is a fairly hardcore geek director who made him famous for his first feature film "Lost in the Internet."

The sequel is still written by Anish Chaganty, which is the core creative control of the film, and the guide tube is handed over to the two new directors, Nicholas Smith. D. Johnson with Will Merrick.

In terms of actors, the heroine is actress Storm Reid, who became famous in recent years with the high-scoring drama "Hyper", in addition to the Korean American actor Daniel Henry.

Although it is a sequel, the story does not have much to do with the previous work, and even if you have not seen the previous one, it does not affect the understanding.

The previous work is about a father looking for a missing daughter, and the sequel switches gender and becomes a daughter looking for a missing mother.

Most of the plot of the story still mainly takes place on the computer desktop, but the sequel adds more perspectives, such as surveillance cameras, smartphones and watches, etc., and the core story thread is still through the protagonist's continuous operation of computer software and search engines to find doubts and clues related to solving the case.

The film begins with a home video in which the young heroine Juan (Storm Reed) originally had a happy family, and her mother Grace and father James were very affectionate in the video.

Unfortunately, father James had cancer and had a nosebleed in the family video.

Shortly after the filming of this last episode of the home video, his father, James, died of illness.

Fast forward to several years, daughter Juan has grown up, due to her father's early death and adolescence, her relationship with her mother Grace is more tense.

At this time, the mother Grace met a new boyfriend, Kevin, and the two decided to go on a week-long vacation to Colombia. At the time of parting, the mother and daughter had conflicts again.

Juan thought that her mother Grace disciplined her very strictly, and when her mother left, she thought that she could relax and be free, but she didn't expect that her mother actually entrusted her friend and lawyer Heather to help take care of her, which made Juan very unhappy.

Fast forward a week, during which Kevin, who was far away in a foreign country, often sent travel photos of his mother Grace to Juan.

However, on the day when her mother was supposed to return to China, Zhu An went to the airport to wait for the pick-up, but never saw anyone. Zhu An, who was a little worried, immediately checked the phone number of the hotel where his mother had graduated from Colum, but after communicating, he learned that his mother and Kevin had long since said goodbye.

The more he thought about it, the more wrong Juan contacted FBI agent Parker and asked him to help investigate his missing mother, at the same time, Juan notified lawyer Heather and tried to use the information left by his mother on social software to find relevant clues.

Not only that, Zhu An also hired Harvey, a local, through the local "errand service platform" where Colum graduated, and asked the other party to investigate in the local area.

Juan suspected his mother's new boyfriend Kevin, so he logged into the other party's mailbox, and found a lot of blocked emails, confirming that Kevin had been in contact with many women, and strangely, the other party called Kevin differently in these emails.

It is inferred from this that Kevin has always used pseudonyms when communicating with these women.

Juan began to infer that Kevin was an emotional liar, so he continued to log in to the other party's dating software, and found that his mother Grace was the Kevin he met through the dating app.

What shocked her even more was that in Kevin's other chat records, it was found that the other party had a criminal record of defrauding multiple women of money.

Juan believes that Kevin kidnapped his mother Grace for money, and she asks Harvey to investigate where her mother has been there, and eventually finds a spot that Kevin and Grace visited before they disappeared.

At this time, FBI agent Parker also assisted in finding surveillance video near the attraction through local police, and saw that several masked bandits kidnapped Kevin and Grace and forcibly abducted them, and the two have not been heard from since.

The police therefore determined that it was a local criminal gang kidnapping, but Zhu An accidentally found that whether it was surveillance video or the travel photos sent to her by Kevin before, her mother never showed her face in the picture.

This aroused Juan's suspicion, and after analyzing the photos, she confirmed that it was not her mother who was with Kevin.

Later, the police found Rachel, the woman who appeared in the video, and after interrogation, the other party confessed that Kevin lied about filming a reality TV show in Colombia and asked her to be an actress, so there were those videos and photos disguised as her mother Grace.

And Kevin's real identity is actually a professional fraudster with a previous conviction.

Based on this, the police suspect that the mastermind behind the scenes hired Kevin to take an actress Rachel together to create a fake case of Grace being kidnapped on a foreign tour, in order to mislead the direction of the police investigation.

And the real Grace actually did not go to Colombia at all, she was taken away by a mysterious driver, Jimmy, on the way to the airport.

Zhu An continued to investigate her mother's online information, and unexpectedly discovered that her mother had changed her name and surname, and the person who helped her change her identity was her lawyer friend Heather.

So she sneaked into Heather's office with her smartwatch, only to find that Heather had been killed, and the smartwatch's camera captured the murder.

On the other hand, the Colombian police found Kevin's whereabouts according to the clues provided by the US police, but Kevin was shot and killed during the roundup, and the case reached an impasse.

Just when Zhu An was cornered, he accidentally cracked his mother's encrypted mailbox and found the hometown where Joan lived with her parents when she was a child. 

At this moment, the mysterious driver Jimmy suddenly came to the door, and Juan was shocked when she saw the other party's face, because Jimmy was her father, James, who had died for many years.

At this point in the story, the truth is finally solved.

It turned out that James did not die of cancer that year, he was actually an addict, because he was addicted to drugs, he would have nosebleeds, and often abused his mother Grace. Grace finally couldn't bear to call the police and sent her husband to prison.

At the same time, she weaves the lie that James died of cancer to tell her daughter Juan, and James, who is in prison, threatens to take revenge on his wife, and Grace has to find a lawyer Heather to help change her name and move to another city with her daughter.

However, James still finds out Grace's whereabouts, and in order to take revenge on her, James seduces Kevin, a fraudster he previously knew in prison, and conspires to kidnap Grace, and now he has his daughter set his sights on again.

James forcibly takes his daughter back to the old house where he used to live, and his mother Grace is also imprisoned here, and the emotional James wants to take revenge on the mother and daughter.

In order to protect her daughter, the mother Grace fought with the out-of-control James, but was shot and wounded, and in a critical moment, Grace stabbed James in the neck with a piece of broken glass and killed him.

Mother Grace is now injured and unconscious, Juan suddenly remembered that her mobile phone was placed in front of the computer, so through the camera in the house, the mobile phone Siri was awakened through the screen, and finally successfully called the police, and the mother and daughter were saved.

This is the end of the story of the movie.

"Network Lost 2" inherits the successful experience of the previous work, using the pictures on the computer screen to narrate the whole process, still focusing on the themes of "missing people" and "human flesh search", with family affection as the core, telling a suspenseful detective story in the Internet era.

The film implants an Easter egg related to the previous game shortly after the opening, just after the opening. The heroine was browsing the web and played a criminal series, and it happened that the case was the case of the father looking for his daughter in the first episode, and at the same time echoed the end of the movie, and the story of the sequel heroine's search for her mother was finally made into a movie.

The freshest thing about this set of movies is that the protagonist of the story is not a professional detective or a hot-blooded policeman, but the most ordinary ordinary person, and the protagonist's investigation process does not rely on various props, but is an Internet search engine and social software that are familiar to contemporary people. Between layers of browser windows and a messy desktop, the story opens up a constant reversal.

Therefore, this movie is not only to tell a suspense story that reverses the brain, but also to show how to use modern technology to find clues, and the audience is like the protagonist in front of the big screen to find out the truth of the case together, this sense of immersion and experience is the most attractive part of the film.

In the Internet era, people have no "secrets" to speak of, convenience and privacy are double-edged swords, and this is also the most thoughtful and terrifying place of the whole story, just a social software account drama may reveal all the secrets of a person, after watching it makes people sweat.

The biggest success of suspense films must be to make the audience unable to guess who the murderer is, and there are bound to be several suspicious characters who mislead the audience in the process, and "Network Lost 2" is no exception to follow this routine, making the first half of the movie full of certain interestingness, unfortunately, this fun did not continue to the end.

On the one hand, the film has many loopholes in the story logic, and many plot twists cannot be justified (for example: as long as the heroine can hack into Gmail, all platforms can be hacked, but Kevin is a professional liar, is alertness still so low?). ), on the other hand, the reversal of the identity of the murderer is also more abrupt.

However, overall, "Cyber Lost 2" is still a sequel worth watching, it is still a suspense film without a cold scene, the choreographer maintains the characteristics of the previous work, with a fairly tight pace and a more complex storyline.

Although it may not be as stunning as the first episode, it is already better than many similar works for a low-budget suspense movie.