Midnight radio-show hostess Vicky searches for her lover, Dog, who disappeared without a trace. While investigating his whereabouts in Taipei City, Vicky comes across a group of good-looking and stylish youngsters (Cola, Money, and Assassin) interested and interrelated in a labyrinth website “Missing.com/ing” with various discussions on “Missing.” The group’s search for Dog leads them to Playing, a femme fatale, who might be the cause of men’s vanishing. Meanwhile, among them there appears a love triangle or entangle. During their journeys, mainly in the city and its deserted corners, these young people encounter the existential epiphany of being missing. At last, they enter a CGI paradise/wonderland where all lost memories, objects and loved ones are found.

As a commercial and music-video director, Chen Hung-I’s second feature film is filled with exquisite images of ethereal beauty, carefully crafted visual wonder, fascinatingly framed landscapes/cityscapes, haunting post-rock music, photogenic faces and figures of the stars with stylish clothes of fashion-show models. It turns out to be cool and charming characters roaming about in dreamy urban landscapes and uttering lyrical and philosophical words about love and loss. Its prosaic narrative circles around the mysterious trajectories of disappearance, including missing bees, human extinction, lost objects and the departure of loved ones. Melancholy metaphors and sentimental symbols are abundant but of little organic/logic correlation. However, this film reflects the dream/desire of the teens and youth in urban Taiwan, that is, a “bourgeois-bohemian” (Bobo) lifestyle with the aura of Japanese Young Adults films, which has affected the aesthetics of a whole generation since early 90s. In short, this film could serve as a complete catalog of contemporary young hipsters in Taiwan. Moreover, the subject “missing” leads the camera to those peculiar sites in decay or in ruins, in a sense preserving some unique cityscapes of Taipei, which might actually disappear in the near future.

DVD source：Taiwan Cinema Toolkit, Ministry of Culture, R.O.C.