Searching throws up some mixed results
Amini vogue has developed for films which happen entirely within the confines of a computer screen. They are, I suppose, the perfect analogy for our time, and when they’re ingenious enough (Unfriended isa decent example), they can actually work. The clever thing about Unfriended was that it happened in real time: Searching manages to stretch over a time-frame of several days without unduly boring the viewer. And while its denouement feels a bit like an episode of Columbo, for a long time it keeps you engaged.
John Cho is David Kim, the conscientious but smothering single parent of a teenage girl called Margot (Michelle La). His relationship with his daughter is not as close as he likes to think, and when she inexplicably goes missing, David discovers things he never knew about her when he accesses her computer. While the ensuing police manhunt is the dramatic spine of the movie, with Debra Messing playing a very committed detective, Searching is at its best when amusingly illustrating the yawning technological generation gap between kids and parents. It’s fun, for a while.
Some of you will remember Ida, Pawel Pawlikowski’s haunting 2015 drama about a novice nun with a wavering vocation. Cold War, also filmed in black and white, is at the very least its equal: partly inspired by his parents’ romance, it brings to life the stern and stifling world of postwar Poland.
In a bizarre geopolitical twist, the Communist rulers of that country blended Soviet-style repression with an enthusiasm for folk music. Composer Wictor Warski (Tomasz Kot) is auditioning musicians for a state-sponsored folk troupe when he spots a handsome, free-spirited girl called Zula (Joanna Kulig). Wictor is smitten and their love affair will change his life and lead them towards the holy grail of defection.
Like Ida, Cold War is a film of staggering subtlety and depth, which uses music, mood and Soviet iconography to juxtapose the heat of the couple’s passion with the cruel indifference of a monolithic state. Based on the interviews of journalist Ed Moloney, Maurice Sweeney’s fine documentary I, Dolours tells the story of one of the more fascinating participants in the Troubles of Northern Ireland.
Hailing from a staunchly republican Belfast family, Dolours Price was involved in the civil rights movement but joined the IRA following the violent Loyalist backlash. She took part in the disappearances and the Old Bailey bombings, was jailed and went on hunger strike.
I, Dolours uses well done re-enactments to augment the vivid testimony of Price, who reflects ruefully on her experiences. Sometimes she seems to express remorse, at others she vents fury at the peace process, which, from her point of view, made a nonsense of everything she’d done. She could never escape her violent past, and died of an overdose in 2013.
And finally, a word about Upgrade, Leigh Whannell’s amusing sci-fi horror. Set in a futuristic Manhattan where technology has managed to widen the chasm between rich and poor, the film stars Logan Marshall-Green as Grey Trace, a nostalgic car mechanic who doesn’t trust the sleek, driverless vehicles his wife skates about in. He’s right: when her bus malfunctions, they crash in a bad part of town and are attacked.
She dies, he’s left crippled, at which point an apparently kindly tech genius called Aron Keen offers to install a tiny computer in his spine which may help him move again. It does, but the computer has a voice and starts to take him over.
Upgrade knowingly evokes trashy 80s sci-fi B-movies, and has a clanging soundtrack Arnold Schwarzenegger would approve of. It’s got good ideas, and might have been a better picture if it hadn’t been so grimly determined to wallow in the gore.