10 Surprisingly Dark Moments In Laika's Missing Link
3. The Villains Threaten To Shoot A Baby
Near the climax of the film, Piggot-Dunceby catches up with Ama Lahuma and Gamu, the mountain-dwellers who ultimately lead Frost, Link and Adelina to the yeti civilization. Piggot-Dunceby initially tries to gather information by threatening Gamu, but this doesn't work. He then has Stenk threaten the chicken on her head, but Gamu is evidently unaware that there's a bird living on top of her skull in the first place. How can he possibly coerce information out of a character so dense?
Simple: he just threatens to shoot her newborn grandson.
Infanticide is already pretty dark for a family movie, but it actually gets worse. Recall past entries, and the fact that Piggot-Dunceby has a vested interest in hiding the evolutionary truths suggested by Link's existence. He now knows that there's an entire tribe of similar creatures. He also knows that this family is able to provide evidence that those creatures exist. In other words, this mountain-dwelling family possesses the same type of information that Piggot-Dunceby was willing to kill Frost over.
What can we conclude from this? Technically nothing. However, if Piggot-Dunceby is truly trying to hide evolutionary links, then he'd be smart to kill the mountain-dwellers as soon as he acquired the necessary information. We don't see it, but it's all too plausible that the defenseless baby in the cabin was murdered off-screen, just for the sake of hiding the knowledge possessed by the child's ancestry.