This film uses Andrew O’Hagan’s book, The Missing, as its starting point. Part-investigation, part-memoir, the book was prompted by the uncovering of the gruesome murders by Fred and Rosemary West the previous year, but it was also a journey into O’Hagan’s own Scottish childhood. Fagen and O’Hagan knew each other as teenagers in the New Town of Irvine on the Ayrshire coast. Missing opens with the camera looking out over the Firth of Clyde and continues through Irvine and Glasgow, ending in London. There are references to the notorious serial killers Peter Tobin and ‘Bible John’, who met his victims in Glasgow’s Barrowlands Ballroom in the 1960s. A meditation on the themes of O’Hagan’s novel, the film deals with absence, loss and the impact of the missing on those who remain.