SCREAM TIME
Online lives are exposed in new mystery-thriller
You might want to watch Searching in theatres, rather than wait for it to come to a streaming service.
Like the clever 2015 horror film Unfriended and its dumb sequel Dark Web, the action all takes place on a laptop screen. Adding another frame to the mix might be a border too far.
John Cho stars as David Kim, an Everydad raising his 16-yearold daughter Margot (Michelle La), alone after the death of his wife some years earlier. They’re close-ish; she doesn’t tell him that she’s been skipping piano lessons, for instance, and he doesn’t really know who her friends are. So when she goes SEARCHING
1/2 out of 5
Cast: John Cho, Debra Messing, Michelle La Director: Aneesh Chaganty Duration: 1 h 42 m
missing after an all-night study session, it takes a while for him to move from exasperation to full-blown panic.
Aneesh Chaganty co-wrote and directed this slow-burn mystery, although he throws so many red herrings into the stew that the result almost qualifies as a cooking show. Helping to fry them up is Debra Messing as perhaps the most intense police detective ever; there’s also Joseph Lee as David’s shifty brother.
Chaganty does a good job keeping the screen-only conceit working; it wasn’t until more than an hour into the movie that it occurred to me that David’s data charges must be off the hook. But the screenplay is sometimes a touch too busy — happy to ride in thriller territory one minute, it will suddenly shift into an awkward critique of social media the next.
Still, good luck at figuring out the solution to this puzzle until the film spells it out for us in the final reel. But if the conclusion feels like a bit of a cheat, it’s still fun to watch Cho’s impression of a man gradually coming unglued over the course of 100 minutes. He starts to literally strike out at those around him while Messing ’s Detective Vick tries her best to keep him from imploding.
It’s also interesting to watch how the film documents the curatorial aspects of our online lives, from the deliberate — livestreaming, whether by individuals or news corporations — to the unintentional. Everyone with a Facebook account or Twitter feed leaves a trail of binary breadcrumbs, usually unremarked-upon.
But pick up your phone and scroll through the browsing history, phone calls, texts. That’s you. And if you were to vanish tomorrow, the frayed end of that digital string would be where people started to look for you.