Searching (2018)

Searching is a somber suspense-thriller that plays like a mix of a couple of other social media-savvy films like Catfish, Open Windows, and Unfriended, seeking to throw audiences based on the fact that much of our lives now involve online interactions with people we don’t really know well, and may not be who they say they are at all.

We start the film off, a la Pixar’s into to Up, with a moving set of scenes in which David Kim (played by John Cho, Star Trek: Beyond) experiences the joy of being a husband and father, only to lose out when his wife (Sara Sohn, Furious 7) dies of cancer, leaving him to raise their only child, Margot (Michelle La), on his own.  As father’s go, he is very interested in what happens to now-teenager Margot, though she does have an independent streak that causes her not to divulge everything that’s going on in her life to him.  This comes into play when David stops getting messages from Margot, not just for hours, but days. He desperately tries to find some way to figure out her whereabouts based on her social media “friends”, but soon finds out that those friends are barely acquaintances, and some of those acquaintances may not even be real.

Enter Rosemary Vick (Debra Messing, Open Season), a detective and missing-persons expert who seeks to help David find the right path to finding out what happened to his daughter. While Vick works on the case externally, David must go through the painful process of reliving melancholy memories as he delves deeper into his wife’s laptop to find information that she meticulously kept on Margot and her contacts, further increasing the feeling that he hasn’t paid as close attention to his daughter by not being able to answer basic questions on where she might go and who she might see in her life on a day-to-day basis.  Margot also left behind her laptop, oddly, revealing to her father, as he peels back the layers of her online persona, that he knows very little of what goes on when she’s not in his physical presence, which is not very much these days.

Actor John Cho, primarily known to most film-goers from his comedies, gets to put on his dramatic acting chops and delivers a credible performance as a concerned father who soon comes to wit’s end in trying to find his daughter at any cost.  I don’t completely buy the hot-headed nature of his character when he grows unhinged at not getting proper answers, but it’s not so off that it negatively impacts the intrigue of the plot once it is mounted.  Michelle La, in her first film role, also does a nice job in support through video footage as the daughter who may be more troubled and unstable than her father had ever had any right to believe.

Produced by gimmicky low-budget thriller maestro Timur Bekmambatov (Hardcore Henry), Searching is co-written and directed by first-time feature film-maker Aneesh Chaganty. Although all of the action takes place across various screens, from cell phones to tablets to laptops to televisions to security cameras, it plays out much more effectively than most that try to give us reality-based drama, a la found-footage films, as we’re watching the search for information, which, in this day and age, is done mainly digitally and from a distance.  The film only took about two weeks to shoot, but didn’t get completed for another couple of years due to the amount of editing and licensing involved in creating the online world that pushes forward all of the story-line from start to finish.

Although the film works as a mystery and thriller notions of every parent’s nightmare of losing their child, perhaps permanently, it scores some unique points on the theme that what’s worse than losing a child for a parent is also in the realization that they never truly knew who their child was and what they might have been going through prior to that loss. It also taps into that surreal feeling one gets when traversing through social media and finding out that nothing and no one are what they truly appear to be in reality as compared to how they present themselves online.

As someone who has worked in I.T. for some time, there are a number of obvious shortcuts and inconsistencies that the film takes in order to get us from the beginning to its destination in an economical fashion, so a healthy amount of suspension of disbelief is called upon for those who are semi-savvy about older versions of Windows, Mac laptops, social media sites, and cell phones.  In fact, the weakest part of the film is the artificial-sounding dialogue that occurs between David and anyone he might speak to love, as phone conversations feel like script readings and video chat programs like FaceTime seem to be used in ways I’ve never experienced in my casual conversations with family and friends.  Another big weakness are the obvious tells that David stumbles into during his researching — an odd looking newspaper article, an awkward photo, a curious tidbit offered in conversation — all of which will make the reveals the film employs later feel expected as the pieces of the puzzle get put into place in ways we may have suspected at the onset of the film’s plot.

Although Searching has received approval from the vast majority of print and online critics, I would caution potential viewers to keep high expectations at bay.  While some will no doubt be enthralled at the nifty premise, it is more of an evolutionary genre piece, rather than a revolutionary one.  Although released theatrically, and doing relatively well in its run, it wouldn’t have been a surprise to gave seen Searching as a straight-to-VOD release, given its lack of box office draw in the cast and its very modest budget. It does have an inherent shoddiness in its plotting that will make a few eyes roll once it’s all said and done, but it does manage to stay on the positive side of things by allowing us to have a vested sympathy toward the family, thanks to that opening sequence, that allows us to view the plot as something meaningful to its characters beyond merely trying to solve a mystery.

Qwipster’s rating: B-

MPAA Rated: PG-13 for thematic content, some drug and sexual references, and for language
Running Time: 102 min.

Cast: John Cho, Debra Messing, Michelle La, Joseph Lee, Sara Sohn
Director: Aneesh Chaganty
Screenplay: Aneesh Chaganty, Sev Ohanian