Searching
**** / *****
Directed
by: Aneesh
Chaganty.
Written
by: Aneesh
Chaganty and Sev Ohanian.
Starring:
John
Cho (David Kim), Debra Messing (Detective Rosemary Vick), Joseph Lee (Peter), Michelle
La (Margot), Sara Sohn (Pamela Nam Kim).

The film opens with a touching
montage – and evolving series of computer screens through the years showing the
lives of David (John Cho), his wife Pamela (Sara Sohn) and their only daughter
Margot (Michelle La), through the years as Margot grows up, and Pamela fights
an ultimately losing battle with cancer. The main action will happen over just
a few days – with Margot now in high school, and David trying his best to
parent her, but avoiding some of the tougher subjects – mainly her mother. They
communicate mainly by text message and FaceTime calls. When Margot goes missing
one night after study group, and David gets increasingly frantic, and has to
find ways to break into her social media accounts, etc. to try and find her, he
starts to realize just how much about his daughter he didn’t know. The police will
eventually become involved – Detective Rosemary Vick (Debra Messing) is
assigned the missing persons case, and the tension ratchets up with each new
discovery.
I won’t spoil what happens from
there – one of the chief pleasures of Searching is see the plot twists and
turns, most of which I will admit surprised me (even if I was suspicious given
the name of the teams at the school Margot attends, which is cleverly shown in
the background, but never spoken aloud). What I will say is that the movie works
remarkably well, given the limitations the concept of the movie has – and a lot
of the credit has to go to John Cho, who delivers an excellent performance as
the increasingly frazzled David. Most of the movie is him on a webcam, with a
split screen between him and what he is looking at on the screen itself (or
just the screen). It’s a performance that requires a lot from Cho, without
giving him the kind of normal room an actor has to work with – and he’s
excellent. The rest of the performances work well – and ride that fine line
between being too withholding, and too obvious in terms of the secrets the
characters will eventually reveal.
The film is a quite a calling
card for first time filmmaker Aneesh Chaganty as well – who finds a way to make
this all visually interesting, as well propulsive in terms of its narrative
momentum (the editing on the film is top notch). I do think that he cheats in
the end – there are things we see that we probably wouldn’t, or at least,
shouldn’t be seeing on the computer screen we are watching. These are necessary
to move the story along, but I wish there was another way they found to do it.
Overall though, Searching works
remarkably well – its tense and entertaining, and doesn’t beat you over the
head with a message about technology, or how we become a slave to it (the film
is neutral on the subject, but you can certainly read it in both directions if
you wanted). Plus, the filmmakers had to find a way to keep this all tense
without resorting to the scare tactics that Unfriended had. The result is a
fascinating, entertaining film.
No comments:
Post a Comment