A white horse, terrified and riderless, gallops along a deserted avenue in the middle of the night. It is a surreal image, a fragment of dreamlike panic that pierces the veil of apparent order imposed by curfew and the incessant roar of helicopters. This apparition, worthy of a painting by De Chirico reinterpreted by a shocked Goya, is the aesthetic and semantic keystone of Scomparso (Missing), Costa-Gavras's 1982 masterpiece. It is not a simple detail of color, but the epiphany of a chaos that has devoured logic, the perfect synthesis of a nation derailed by history, where even animals participate in the incomprehensible tragedy of men.

Formally, the film presents itself as a political thriller, an investigation into the disappearance of American journalist and writer Charles Horman during the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. But reducing Missing to a genre label would be like defining Kafka's The Trial as a simple detective novel. Costa-Gavras, already a master of investigative cinema with the electrifying Z, slows down the pace here, lowers the emotional temperature, and digs deeper. The external investigation becomes a pretext for a descent into hell, a journey into the heart of darkness, not of an exotic jungle, but of diplomatic bureaucracy and Realpolitik. The protagonist of this journey is not an adventurer, but the most anti-heroic figure imaginable: Ed Horman, played by a monumental Jack Lemmon in one of the most heart-wrenching and measured performances in cinema history.

Ed Horman is the American with a capital A, a Christian Science businessman, conservative, methodical, convinced of the unshakeable righteousness of his nation and its institutions. When he arrives in Santiago to look for his son, whose ‘bohemian’ lifestyle and progressive ideas he disapproved of, he brings with him a wealth of rock-solid certainties. He expects answers, efficiency, a form to fill out to get back what is his. Waiting for him is his daughter-in-law, Beth (an intense and restrained Sissy Spacek), who in his eyes embodies everything he does not understand about his son's generation: idealism, emotional disorder, a complex and critical worldview. The meeting between the two is not only an alliance forced by tragedy, but a philosophical, generational, and political clash. Beth already understands; Ed has yet to learn. She is his Cumaean Sibyl, his reluctant guide in a purgatory of consular offices and military ministries where language is a weapon of misdirection and truth is a contraband commodity.

Here, the film abandons the tracks of the conventional thriller to transform itself into a Kafkaesque nightmare. Charles' search runs aground in a labyrinth of polite smiles, empty reassurances, and plausible denials. The American officials, with their icy courtesy and evasive promises, become the guardians of an inaccessible castle whose rules are inscrutable. Every door Ed knocks on leads him to another corridor, every request for information generates only more paperwork. Costa-Gavras films this bureaucratic odyssey with almost documentary-like precision, but his true genius lies in conveying the terror that lurks beneath the surface of normality. The violence of the regime is almost never shown directly; it is a spectral entity, evoked by the omnipresent sound of distant gunfire, by checkpoints, by the frightened faces of ordinary people, and above all, by silence. It is the cinema of the unseen, of the off-screen that becomes more terrifying than any explicit image.

The narrative structure of the film, co-written by Costa-Gavras and Donald E. Stewart (who won a well-deserved Oscar), is an assemblage of fragments, an incomplete mosaic. Through flashbacks, evoked by the stories of Beth and other witnesses, we reconstruct Charles' last days. We never see him as a passive victim, but as a keen observer, a man who, like the protagonist of Antonioni's L'Avventura, vanishes, leaving a void that redefines the existence of those left behind. His absence becomes the catalyst for his father's transformation. He begins his journey to “find Charles,” but ends up “finding the truth” about Charles and, consequently, about his own world. The most painful discovery is not the death of his son, but the realization that the institutions he has always believed in are not only powerless, but complicit. It is the collapse of a faith, the death of American innocence that Graham Greene had already masterfully recounted in The Quiet American. And Horman is the least quiet American of all, a man whose faith in the system is systematically dismantled, piece by piece.

The sequence at the National Stadium in Santiago is perhaps the film's high point, a moment of pure cinema that transcends the narrative. Ed and Beth wander around this huge bowl turned concentration camp, calling Charles' name in a deafening silence, broken only by the echo of their voices. The architecture itself, designed for jubilation and collective celebration, becomes a monument to dehumanization, a non-place where thousands of lives have been reduced to numbers awaiting their fate. The shot of Lemmon, small and fragile amid those empty bleachers, is the image of a man alone in the face of the inconceivable immensity of organized evil.

Meta-textually, Missing can be read as a precursor to “screenlife” or “found footage” cinema, but in an analog and intellectual form. Ed and Beth are like two detectives trying to piece together a film (Charles's life) from scattered film clips (the testimonies), searching for meaning in a chaotic montage full of ellipses. Each memory is a scene, each testimony a different take, and the final truth is not a cathartic revelation, but a chilling final montage, confirmed by a low-level bureaucrat in a morgue that looks like an archive of horror.

Vangelis' soundtrack, far from the triumphant tones of Chariots of Fire, is a melancholic and spectral soundscape.

Its electronic notes do not emphasize the action, but create a mood, a funeral lament for a generation of idealists and for a betrayed idea of democracy. It is the music of emptiness, of mourning that finds no peace. Released in the midst of the Reagan era, Missing was an act of extraordinary political courage.

Although it never explicitly mentions Chile or Pinochet (a choice that, paradoxically, universalizes the story, making it applicable to every “desaparecido” in the world), the reference was very clear and caused controversy and lawsuits from State Department officials. But the film is not a pamphlet. Its strength lies not in its political denunciation, powerful as it is, but in its deeply human core. It is the story of a father who learns to know and respect his son only through his absence, recognizing in him a courage and integrity he had never attributed to him. The final scene, in which Ed Horman, now a broken but aware man, files a lawsuit against his own government, is not a victory ending. It is the beginning of another lonely and probably lost battle in another kind of labyrinth, the legal one. His transformation is complete: the patriot has become a dissident.

Missing is a film that works by subtraction. It subtracts the protagonist, it subtracts explicit violence, it subtracts easy answers, it subtracts catharsis. What remains is a deafening void, the space left by a missing person, which becomes the mirror in which a man, and with him an entire nation, is forced to look at his own distorted face. It is a desolate and necessary masterpiece, a thriller of the soul that reminds us how the greatest disappearance is sometimes that of truth.