“Just start from the beginning,” says a member of the authorities at the very starts of Aisling Byrne’s entertaining and thoughtful short film, Mary Is Missing, but this is no ordinary mystery.
In the last decade or so, our culture has been swept away by the notion of true crime stories. We feel an instant connection to them, we obsess over the evidence, and we sometimes feel so close to them that we insert ourselves into the narratives. Maybe we suppose our outside point of view grants us permission to crack the case, but Byrne
On a seemingly normal day at Yellow Tree Day Service, Lauren arrives back from holiday a little reluctant for her shift where she works as a caregiver for a group of people living with intellectual disabilities. When she gets to her office, Leah is bouncing around looking for her tablet, and Tom is in Lauren’s office wanting to speak to her. Lauren’s co-worker, Mary, has left her coat and purse on Lauren’s desk, and she asks her co-worker, Craig, where she is before he tells her that she hasn’t been to Yellow Tree in a few days.
When Detective Foley arrives to question the staff, Lauren keeps saying that “everything will be fine,” and that kind of thinking is natural when a crisis begins to become more and more dire and no easy answers can be found. Foley then brings the residents in one by one to see if they can remember anything about the week, and that is when Mary Is Missing allows the drama to percolate. Leah suggests that Joanna, another service user, and Mary had an argument on the last day that she was seen, and another person suggests that Mary seemed stressed. The mystery surrounding Mary’s whereabouts become increasingly more outlandish, and you begin to wonder if everyone is uniting to hide something or if they are simply telling the truth.
Byrne created a set full of collaboration and communication with these actors given the opportunity to have input on their characters and their interactions with one another. The filmmaker was able to pull from her experience in the theater to develop a batch of characters who are feel like they are holding onto a precious secret that drives their needs and wants and, thusly, drives our curiosity.
Mary Is Missing flows from inquisitive mystery to true character study. Byrne introduces us to a clan of performers that I would love to see in a series of adventures together. You want to know these people as much as you want to find Mary.
