She called for help on a lonely frequency — and no one answered.
Melissa (2025) is a haunting, emotionally layered mystery-drama that peels back the silence surrounding a girl who vanished — not into thin air, but into the folds of a community too afraid to listen. It’s part Gone Girl, part Past Lives, told with aching quietude and an undercurrent of rage.
Set in a sleepy midwestern town, the film follows Rowan, a radio archivist who returns home after decades away. When she inherits her late father’s tape collection — once part of a public access station — she discovers a series of chilling, unpublished broadcasts. Among them: the voice of Melissa, a teenage girl who once called in regularly during the early ’90s. She spoke in riddles, poetry, and hints of abuse. Then one day… she stopped.
What begins as curiosity becomes obsession, and Rowan sets out to trace Melissa’s story — through tapes, old journals, yearbooks, forgotten friends, and broken adults. But the more she uncovers, the more the town pushes back. Memories distort. Records disappear. And Rowan finds herself confronting not only Melissa’s vanishing, but her own buried history.
Directed with restraint and sorrow, Melissa is less about the "what" and more about the "why nobody asked." It becomes a requiem for forgotten girls, for the things we almost noticed, and the echoes that never fade. With grainy cassette tapes, overgrown fields, and moments of eerie stillness, it’s a quiet film that demands to be heard.
Because sometimes the scariest ghosts are the ones we ignored while they were still alive.
