User reviews

Internationally known as "Missing: The Lucie Blackman Csse", this is a feature-length documentary of a true crime case. Taking place in 2000's Japan, a 21-year british girl has gone missing in Tokyo. This documentary gives an overview of the facts that happened since she went missing.

What makes this true crime documentary interesting is not only the large (inter-)national attention that the case a caught in the 2000's, but also how exactly her father was able to gain all the attention and thereby pressure the japanese police to take all the actions possible to push this case forward. In my opinion, it is exactly this pressure that got this case eventually solved.

The documentary is based on (1) interviews with many involved parties - e.g. Family, press, police, (forensic) investigators - combined with (2) footage from 2000 that was taped during the course of the investigation, and (3) newly recorded footage on-site. It is an attractive combination of material that gives the viewer an overview of many relevant facts of the investigation that took place. Unfortunately, we get to see practically nothing of the trial(s) itself.

What I found missing in this documentary, is more information on whom exactly Lucie Blackman was. Yes, we get some information on her having been a stewardess and now a hostess in Japan. But other than that, we only get to see a photo of how she looked. It would have been more fair to her, if the documentary would have put more time in describing her youth, interests and upbringing. Some interviews with former friends would have given the viewer some emotional connection with her.

What I also would have liked to see, is more information on the "profession" of being a hostess in Japan. This topic was only covered very shortly by interviews with two authors that wrote a book on this profession. These short interviews got me as viewer left with more questions than answers - a fact that I think other viewers will also experience.

Summarizing, I found the documentary an interesting watch. For someone interested in true crime, it will also give an idea of how cases are investigated in Japan. As such, I award this documentary a score of 7.2/10, thereby making it a 7-star IMDb rating.

There's been a sort of backlash against true crime sensationalism lately, to the sort of degree where there's been an intentional shift towards a focus on the victims of crime rather than the criminals or police. Though even that has gradually started to see this leading to exploitation.

This documentary goes a very odd route by seemingly avoiding the victim to a large degree. Lucie Blackman's disappearance is the driving force here, but from the very start we are essentially following the police and their investigation. We don't know who Lucie Blackman is, what she was doing before she disappeared, who she knew, anything that a typical documentary would, setting up the person, brief backstory, then their disappearance and then the investigation.

Instead we jump straight into the investigation. At the same time, focus is being given to Lucie's father who apparently has to harangue the police into actually investigating this as a crime.

Even from there there's not much actually going on in terms of a narrative here around Lucie Blackman. We're shown her father railing against the cops and their apparent ineptitude but we never actually see or hear how they are mishandling the case at first.

Once the cops start down the case, leads are picked up on and followed but we aren't very clear in terms of how said leads were picked up on and how they even relate to the Blackman case, possibly in large part because we skipped over the basic facts of the case and started the documentary with her already missing and without ever really looking back into the "who what where why how" of her actual disappearance.

This is a documentary, so it's supposed to be informative first, with the entertainment aspect being a sort of uncomfortable pushed-aside element that is implied but never made obvious.

Because of this, it's hard to review a documentary, since critiquing it for being boring or otherwise not entertaining is kind of missing the point and a lot like critiquing the news for constantly moving on to new topics of reporting and discussion.

As a result, my problem with this documentary isn't with the entertainment but with the information given. Namely, we aren't given a lot of information. As mentioned, they start off 3 days after the disappearance, and don't give us the starting facts that almost every missing persons case starts with. As well, when we're being told about certain things, we aren't actually shown enough information that would support what is being shown.

As an example, at one point we are told about a trial and the results of a trial. However we are not given any information as to why the result of the trial ended up how it went, particularly considering that we went along with the discovery of the key bits of evidence with the police. Why did this happen? Why did it fail? From just this documentary alone, we don't know.

This is a very well done and compelling true crime documentary about the disappearance of a British foreign National in Japan who becomes the linchpin for the investigation into sexual deviance and sexual crime in Japan. The case unveiled a look at how The Japanese police treated sex crimes and crimes against foreigners. The show features archival footage, contemporary interviews, and documents associated with the case. Jake Adelstein, the subject of HOB's Tokyo Vice, is featured as a Western reporter with intimate knowledge of Japan and the Japanese police. The show is good. It is sad, but good. The show has a lot of cultural undertones, and it is tight as far as documentaries go.

This is obviously a tragic case, the anguish and desperation are perfectly understandable.

However, the attitude? Why do British nationals so often behave like this in an international setting? From British journalists throwing stereotypical comments about another culture, to Tim Blackman's initial disrespect and antagonistic attitude to random Japanese people/cops who are just trying to go about their lives. Again, it's a serious case, and it's understandable that certain standard behavior is out-of-the-window here, but trying to stick your posters anywhere then giving an officer a hard time for nicely telling him not to?

Imagine a foreigner who made a scene in London after their hostess daughter went missing. They then tried to stick posters everywhere downtown, then their entourage of journalists/friends throw stereotypical comments like "oh you know the Brits, they may seem reserved, but there's a dark side under the belly," sneering at the police instead of trying to engage with them first... they might be tackled to the ground forthwith, let alone being given big platforms to present their case to the media and being allowed to do whatever they want (including setting up a hotline, which the Tokyo Met claims might interfere with investigation), all the while with many locals offering assistance.

Look, not suggesting that the Tokyo Met is beyond reproach here, all police forces are flawed, including the Scotland Yard, and their actions deserve scrutiny. Just saying that a sense of self-entitlement isn't going to help anything.

Extremely biased story telling, eluding many important facts of the story, including the father receiving 450k£ from the killer to limit his sentence, or the existence of her friend and colleague who had received a phone call from the killer on day one.

Only the father and cops are giving testimonies to re-write History, and skip all the aspects that could hurt Japanese police.

When you check who the director is, you understand the story is told in a way to clean Tokyo police image only.

Netflix should be ashamed of producing such content, without any fact checking, and depicting an absolutely misleading representation of the actual story.

Go on YouTube or listen to podcasts, you will have better quality content to understand the full story instead of wasting your time with this piece of propaganda.

Has everything you'd want in a true crime documentary: a fascinating case, tons of archival footage, linear storytelling, very little (if any) re-enactments, a beautiful score and some stunning photography (Tokyo is a beautiful city). Not to mention interviews with the actual people involved. So many docs these days fail in at least one of these areas so it's nice to see one that does it all right for a change.

Obviously it's a sad case and a terrible situation for her family, so you can't fault her father for wanting answers. And that's another fascinating element to this case is the dynamic between her family (father, generally) and the Japanese police who handle things a bit differently than we're used to in the West.

Overall, one of the best true crime docs I've seen this year. Definitely recommend.

Shamelessly disregarding the clumsiness and stupidity of the Japanese police, never talking about the phone calls Philippe recieved on the first day of Lucie missing and police not bothering to trace ,nor about the £450,000 (in 2006) Tim Blackman received to "forgive" Obara. Why was no one else from Lucie's friends and family interviewed? Why was Caritas liver biopsied 15 years later? Why only the people that walked over her blood were there? Why was there no mention of the phone calls Lucie made on the day to inform her friend of her whereabouts which the police decided to ignore? Utterly biased and shamelessly fooling!

I know this story pretty well already, having read a few books on it. Tokyo Hostess, in particular, was well written and gave a lot of detail.

This documentary starts when Lucie has already disappeared, so there is no background to her life in Tokyo and her job working in the hostess club. It suffers greatly for this, as this is what would make the casual viewer care about her story.

Instead, it's her father, who I find seriously arrogant, who is star of this show. Not playing down that he lost his daughter, and obviously what happened to Lucie was evil, but I just couldn't deal with him throwing his weight around in another country. I know this won't be a popular opinion. Reading that he accepted a cash payment in hopes of a reduced sentence from a friend of the killer makes him look even worse, honestly.

Lucie took a silly risk to make easy money (again, in no way makes what happened to her okay). Father has the air of wealth, so not sure why he didn't just fund her holiday instead of letting her do that. Even a safe country has its issues.

This documentary completely, and somewhat disgracefully, overlooks the utter incompetence and laziness of the Japanese police. There is no mention of how utterly useless and slow the police were for large parts of the investigation. There are also a couple of very significant points about the investigation that are overlooked or misrepresented to paint the police in a much more favourable light. Quite a disgusting documentary on something so utterly horrific.

It does not take long at all to find out the information that this documentary so drastically misses the mark on.

It seems strange how what appears to be the entirety of the Japanese police force interviewed in the film, but then again if you realised you could have the chance to gloss over catastrophic errors in your job history I'm sure you would do the same.

Half hour in and I can't watch anymore. There are no facts. No one knows anything. Nothing of substance about whatever happened is discussed.

Japanese police must have been morons. They think one guy might be a suspect for no given reason. The find the guy, ask him if he did it...no, he had an alibi. So the Japanese police have to start over again. Start over again from what??? Absolutely nothing about the case is mentioned.

WTF is this.

Lots of spine-tingling music and opinions about the police or the father of the girl...but not a single fact. How am I supposed to be interested when nothing is related about the case?

Whoever made this, stahp. Stay away from documentaries, movies, anything cinema, books, magazine articles, or even trying to relate an interesting anecdote.

The only thing I could personally think of throughout the entire thing was who in their right mind would let their 21 year old daughter go across the world to completely unknown place to work in a hardly legal semi anonymous dark place baiting old men for money, knowingly putting themselves in harm's ways.

The fact that the father never addressed that is baffling. World must had felt a safer place 20 years ago when no parent questioned this. I find this beyond comprehension. The fact that she disappeared less than a month into a job is scary. These are the issues that should had been addressed.