Film uses windows of opportunity
Searching (M, 102 mins) Directed by Aneesh Chaganty Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★
Searching is based on a terrific premise that has been a long-time staple of short film-makers, but I’m pretty sure this is the first time it’s been used in a full feature film format.
At least, never before in a film that’s troubled our multiplexes all the way down here at the last bus stop on Earth. Telling a story only with what is visible on computer and TV screens would have been unthinkable one short generation ago. But in 2018, director Aneesh Chaganty and his co-writer, Sev Ohanian, have such an array of digital windows for us to peer through, they are almost spoilt for choice.
First, there’s the texts and chat apps that David (John Cho) and his daughter, Margot (Michelle La), communicate with while they are at work and school. Then there’s the old videos on David’s laptop of his wife, Sara, as cancer takes her away. And, back in the present day, there’s the many and various social media rabbit holes David must delve into as he tries to find out where Margot is, after she fails to come home one afternoon.
Searching, beneath the conceit of the staging, is a nicely assembled and very acceptably twisty mystery yarn.
Well into the third act it is still anybody’s guess whether Margot has run away, been abducted, or met with an accident.
Only in the last few minutes will your credulity be stretched, and even then only if you are in a cynical frame of mind.
Cho (best known for Star Trek and American Pie) does good work as the increasingly frantic and rage-driven dad, and La is perfectly credible as the ‘‘good daughter’’, who just might be concealing a far darker side than Dad imagines.
The third part of the triangle is Debra Messing (The Mysteries of Laura) as the wary detective hunting for Margot.
Even if it had been more conventionally made, Searching would still have potentially been a better-than-average missing person tale.
But, with the added novelty and necessary inventiveness Chaganty and team have brought to the show, it emerges as one of the more interesting and technically impressive films of the year so far.