Movie Review: "Searching" Hits Refresh on Thrillers and CTRL-Fs a Leading Role for John Cho

Let the legacy of Unfriended never die!

Searching tells the story of a widower, David Kim (played by John Cho), who is trying to contact his unresponsive teenage daughter, Margot (Michelle La), on Skype. He turns desperate when it becomes clear she’s gone missing, harassing her online friends (or are they suspects?) in the process.

It is every parent’s nightmare, and given the way David ends up logging into Margot’s social media accounts and live video-casting on her behalf, every teen’s worst nightmare too.

Here’s the kicker: Searching is set entirely on a screen, beginning on David’s PC and occasionally moving over to Margot’s Mac. We, the viewer, only see what David sees within the display, as he frantically scrolls, makes Facetime calls, opens Apple Maps and watches YouTube clips in pursuit of Margot.

He even puts together a spreadsheet of potential kidnappers. In You Were Never Really Here, Joaquin Phoenix hunts child abductors with a hammer. In Searching, John Cho uses Google Sheets.

Unfriended tried this gimmick first, and was stricter with the parameters, never cutting away or changing our perspective. Director Aneesh Chaganty, by contrast, deploys more familiar cinematic tricks, like close-ups, non-diegetic music and cutting for comedic or dramatic effect. Unfriended felt like a ghost had been given remote access to your screen; Searching just treats it as another setting.

That’s not to say it isn’t inventive; far from it. And to be honest, it’s, ahem, refreshing to know there are multiple ways to tell a story in this format, because Unfriended, while fun, didn’t exactly perfect the medium.

For most of its runtime, Searching keeps you captivated, though the thrills come from wondering how exactly Chaganty and his co-writer Sev Ohanian can keep justifying the computer-recorded action. However, the format eventually hobbles the flick too. Each of David’s thoughts are written on-screen and literally displayed for us, while the final twist is heavily telegraphed and ultimately spelled-out past the point of interest. Searching is free from ambiguity, precisely because computers don’t allow it. (This is the WYSIWYG of films.) What good’s a mystery without a bit of, y’know, mystery?

I suppose that’s where John Cho comes in. Two years after the #StarringJohnCho campaign wondered why this charismatic Asian-American actor wasn’t getting starring roles—and in serendipitous timing, as Crazy Rich Asians dominates the box office—he finally gets his close-up, and makes the most of it.

This one-time teen vessel of the "MILF" catchphrase (never forget) has aged into a convincing movie dad, pushed to the edge without veering into the realm of 'ridiculous Liam Neeson-style action star'. He holds us in nearly every shot of the picture, and we feel for him as he slowly discovers how his daughter presented herself online, and then learns how her online persona vastly differed from her real-world actions.

Searching isn’t at its best as a thriller; it’s at its best as a depiction of how we use the internet to lie. I also appreciated how it shows David benignly browsing the web and opening multiple tabs of news stories at once, without reading any. I mean, I was watching him, but in that moment, it was I who felt truly seen.

3.5/5

In Australian cinemas 13 September. Rated M for coarse language.

Header Image: Sony Pictures