Searching
John Cho plays a dad searching for his missing daughter in this inventive thriller that plays out on computer screens
Steven Spielberg’s recent blockbuster Ready Player One made a stab at visualising what our online life will look like in 2045, and came up with an outlandish array of candy coloured VR vistas fit to burst with various pop culture IPs from the last four centuries. Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching, by contrast, shows what our online life looks like now in 2018. It’s a world we’re all too familiar with: the film, a twisty missing person thriller, ingeniously plays out on various computer screens through a host of windows and tabs, search engines and apps, and endless social media sites.
This isn’t the first movie to play out entirely on computer screens. Joe Swanberg’s segment of portmanteau horror V/H/S took place across various Skype chats between a couple while nifty little ghost story Unfriended expanded Swanberg’s idea to a feature-length online conversation between six people, one of whom is not of this world. Chaganty’s effort, however, is the most inventive and satisfying of the bunch.
It centres on David (Cho), the widowed father of 15-year-old Margot (La). His wife has recently died after a long fight with cancer, as we discover through a flurry of home video images, emails and Google searches (“How to fight lymphoma as a family?”). Poignantly and economically, her losing battle with the disease is revealed by a calendar entry titled “Mom comes home” being deleted and her passing confirmed when her eulogy is drafted.
In their grief, father and daughter seem to be barely communicating with each other, as their flinty text message chain reveals. Then one night, around midnight, Margot tries to reach out to her father, making three missed calls in quick succession. When David tries to reply in the morning, nothing. The teen is missing.
Searching’s gimmick comes into its own as David turns desktop detective, working closely with the no-nonsense cop leading the search (Messing) to scour his daughter’s most private and personal spaces – search histories, Facebook messages, Tumblr posts – to find clues of where she might be and who she was closest to. Despite never leaving the computer frame, cinematographer Juan Sebastian Baron keeps the images thrillingly cinematic, darting across the various screens and applications using zooms and close-ups to guide our eyes and further the story.
Much of the film’s success is down to Cho’s winning performance, which we see in various FaceTime chats, YouTube posts and local news reports. Without his hangdog face and bottomless humanity, Searching would be a much colder film; Cho gives emotional heft to this inventive exploration of a new type of film grammar.
Back in 1999, The Blair Witch Project took the hoariest of ghost stories and made its familiar horror tropes scary again thanks to the thrilling way it utilised the then novel "found footage" style. In its witty use of this “screen movie” form, Searching does something similar to the missing person thriller. Like with found footage, we’re sure to become bored with this technique when a raft of pale imitations follow in Searching’s wake. For now, we have a mint fresh subgenre to celebrate.
Searching screen at Edinburgh International Film Festival on 21 & 22 Jun – more info here
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