Christopher Rhoten
Misper largely focuses on the aftermath of a girl’s disappearance at a failing, historic seaside hotel. One employee in particular—meek, nervous Leonard, played by Samuel Blenkin—begins to notice strange occurrences around the hotel in the wake of her departure (and as we soon learn, death). He has a vision of her trapped in the basement, and later, he hears her speaking to him. There’s something lingering in the hotel that’s pulling Leonard into the void.
While this film name-drops The Shining early on, the premise behind Misper (itself a British term for a missing person) more closely resembles a hypothetical, UK-produced Twin Peaks. Director Harry Sherriff’s debut begins a few days before the inciting incident, with a tone that’s 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Emily Carey’s warm, elegant Elle, the girl in question, is both very much alive and very much the apple of Leonard’s eye—he watches her walk to the hotel every morning through a window on an upper floor.
Though their conversations have an awkward, stop-start charm, there’s an undercurrent of sadness that runs through them as well. Leonard can’t work up the nerve to suggest hanging out after work, or to bring up any topic of consequence, really. Their final interaction is particularly clumsy: Leonard’s not doing anything tomorrow, and neither is Elle, but there’s no effort to meet on either side. The next morning, she’s vanished.
As Sherriff and writer Laurence Tratalos both confirmed in my interview with them, Misper’s POV is an intentional choice. Blenkin’s concierge was not especially close to Elle, a role filled by Elle’s father, nor is he capable of solving the case, unlike the true-crime fanatic who accosts him for information in an unsettling confrontation. Leonard occupies an uncanny middle ground: he’s known Elle for years, but from a distance, and he simply doesn’t know how to feel.
The extraneous hotel’s parallel demise—a result of running out of both business and money—is a nice contrast to Leonard’s attempt to come to terms with the past, and another cloud hanging over the staff. Daniel Ryan’s Gary, the hotel manager, is a recurring source of both laughter and pity, obsessing over reviews in a desperate attempt to keep his ship afloat. That something so full of memory to one person could mean less than nothing to another is the true terror driving this story.
There are a few scares lurking in these halls (the aforementioned fan is this film’s closest analog to a Babadook-esque monster), but Misper is more of a dramedy, or perhaps a tragicomedy. The story sits with Leonard and the rest of the hotel’s diverse crew in the aftermath, in a similar spot as they struggle to move on. There is humor to be found in every rustic nook and cranny, such as when one of Leonard’s coworkers insists, in an attempt to lighten the mood, that Elle might have faked her death, or when Gary objects to the assertion that Elle was simply too good for such a place.
It’s a tone that will leave you similarly bewildered or quickly pull you in; for me, it mostly succeeds at reflecting the banality of real-life tragedy in a way that’s not often seen. Certain jokes will run too dry for some, and Blenkin’s frazzled protagonist hardly commands your attention, but all of these choices feel confident and intentional within the context of such consistent idiosyncrasy.
Some might find it reductive how the film whisks its female lead into the metaphorical fridge. But a film like this is about Elle’s anonymity, right down to the title, constantly reminding us that this was a real person who isn’t around anymore, even if we didn’t know her. A person at risk of being turned by time into a memory of a fantasy, or a role to be cast in a true-crime special. Even if we’ve seen these tropes before, Sheriff’s vision is a fresh lens.
Though slight at only 71 minutes, Misper is an effective satire with a disconcertingly familiar sense of dread. There’s no sensationalized mystery here, except the one an in-universe TV crew creates. It’s easy to forget there are real people behind the mysteries and murders that enrapture so many. Here is a reminder that transmits on a strange wavelength, but with a message that is easy to decode: nothing haunts like words left unsaid.
