Social media receives well-aimed slam in ‘Searching’
While you stare at the screen of this low-budget but stylish thriller, you’ll be staring at a lot of screens within it. Screens on desktop computers, on laptops, on phones, on televisions, from surveillance cameras. There are going to be a lot of detractors who dismiss this as another gimmick film. And yes, constructing a movie around one central concept does earn it gimmick status. But this one should also have some folks championing it.
Told from the point of view of its characters watching those screens, audiences who are disposed to get caught up in it will do so right away, then forget about any clever trickery and get involved in the story.
The plot is kind of standard, a low-rent version of the sort of movie Liam Neeson has been making over and over again.
First-time feature director Aneesh Chaganty, who also cowrote the script, has a nice approach to slowly building the tension with dialogue, facial reactions, and all of those different screens, and he’s aided in amping up the suspense by firsttime feature composer Torin Borrowdale’s quietly throbbing electronic score. The film remains firmly in mystery mode, but comes up for a few breaths of fresh air with some sparkling bits of humor, the best of which is a perfectly placed Justin Bieber joke.
On the way to finding the answer to the mystery, John Cho covers a lot of emotional ground, from being drained by all that’s happening, to freaking out and displaying a pent-up temper. The film ends up taking some strange twists, all the while teasing viewers with multiple MacGuffins and slamming the concept of social media.