Costa-Gavras built Missing around a search: an American father crossing a foreign capital in 1973, trying to find a son-in-law who has vanished into the chaos of a military takeover.
What is Missing about?
Ed Horman flies to Chile after his son Charles goes missing in the aftermath of the coup that toppled the elected government. He does not speak the language and does not, at first, understand the country he has landed in. Charles's wife Beth already does — she has spent days walking between morgues, hospitals, and a stadium turned holding pen, following rumors that lead nowhere. Father and daughter-in-law start out wary of each other; Ed trusts official channels, Beth has learned not to. As embassy assurances keep failing to match what they see on the ground, the two are pushed toward the same uncomfortable conclusion from opposite directions. The film stays close to their search rather than the politics around it, tracking bureaucratic evasions, curfews, and the slow erosion of Ed's certainty that the people he is asking for help are actually trying to find his son.
About the cast
Jack Lemmon plays Ed Horman against type, trading his usual comic timing for a controlled, increasingly rattled performance as a man watching his assumptions fail him in real time. Sissy Spacek gives Beth a wary, hard-won steadiness. John Shea appears as Charles in flashback and early scenes, and the supporting cast — Melanie Mayron, David Clennon, Janice Rule, Charles Cioffi, Richard Venture — fills out the expatriate community and officials Ed and Beth move through.
Context & significance
Costa-Gavras directs from a script rooted in a real disappearance, using the search itself as the film's structure rather than a courtroom or a history lesson. The film runs a lean 122 minutes and moves at the pace of its characters' mounting frustration — long queues, unanswered phones, forms filed and refiled. It won the Palme d'Or the year it premiered and remains one of the more widely cited political dramas of its era, built on a father and daughter-in-law's shared refusal to stop asking questions.
Watching Missing on Ktime
Missing streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so Farsi-speaking viewers can follow Ed and Beth's search either way. Watching requires a free K-Time account — the film page itself is open to browse without logging in. K-Time's interface runs in Farsi throughout, built for the Iranian diaspora watching classic and contemporary cinema together.