Mark Reviews Movies: SEARCHING

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 30, 2018

So much of life now is spent staring at screens. Searching is both an accurate representation of that way of life and a compelling mystery about the disappearance of a teenage girl. The entirety of the film comes from the screens of various devices—desktop computers, laptops, cell phones—and what can be viewed on them—social media accounts, file folders, video chats, hidden camera footage, streams of live news coverage.

This isn't the first film to do such a thing, but its scope is broader than any of the movies that have used this narrative device. So many of those previous exercises in capturing the experience of being on a device felt limited in what they could show or what their characters could do.

Along with conveying the ways that the internet can turn an ordinary person into an amateur detective, co-writer/director Aneesh Chaganty uses the gimmick to tell a personal story, in which a daughter's online presence serves as a realization of how little the girl's father actually knows her and booting up an old personal computer is like raising the spirit of a deceased loved one. There's an emotional weight to this tale, communicated within the tapping of unseen keyboards and the clicking of a mouse, as well as reflected on the screens themselves—in the pain of a father who comes to blame himself for everything that has gone wrong in the life of his missing daughter.

The father is David Kim (John Cho), and the daughter is Margot (Michelle La). Their story begins with a surprisingly affecting montage set entirely on the screen of a single desktop computer. It's a rush through the years of the life of this family, revolving around Margot's first day of school with each passing year. Photos are saved to a folder. Videos are viewed. David and his wife Pamela (Sara Sohn) have separate profile accounts on the computer, and eventually, Margot is old enough to have her own. An email about a cancer diagnosis arrives, and Margot makes a calendar appointment for the day that her mother is scheduled to return home from the hospital. The date is pushed back and then, finally, deleted.

It's a truly moving sequence and quite impressive in how Chaganty elicits so much sympathy for his characters with what would seem like a two-level barrier—occasionally seeing them on a screen within the movie screen but primarily seeing how they use a computer. The basics are communicated, but there's also the establishment of a mystery here. We're only seeing part of what happened. There's a whole world between and within these characters happening beyond the screen on screen.

Two years after Pamela's death, David and Margot have what appears to be a solid enough father-daughter relationship, considering what they've been through. On a random night, Margot, now a 16-year-old high school student, is participating in a study group. David chats with her via text and video about her plans and the garbage she failed to take out that morning. The next morning, Margot isn't at home, but David doesn't think it's too strange.

When she doesn't answer any of his calls or texts throughout the day, though, he begins to worry. There was a camping trip with friends about which he either forgot or never knew, but when it turns out his didn't go, he calls the police to file a report that Margot is missing. Vick (Debra Messing), the detective in charge of the case, tells David to get as much information about his daughter's life, friends, and plans as he can.

There are, we learn, multiple gaps between Margot's actual life and what David believes he knows about her. The plot has him going through Margot's assorted online profiles, making a list of her friends from those websites, interviewing those friends on the phone or through video chats, and viewing her photos and videos—looking for information and clues.

In a way, it's a straightforward mystery, but the most fascinating element of Chaganty and Sev Ohanian's screenplay isn't what may have happened to Margot. It's how David slowly discovering that he might not have been as supportive of, aware of, or even present in his daughter's life as he imagined. Every click of the mouse, every new detail from an acquaintance, and every discovery of some previously unknown account online bring with it a new line of questions, most of them reflected back on David's own absence from Margot's life.

Chaganty communicates all this with hesitant typing, beats in between clicks, and, of course, in an on-screen window that's almost always open, showing David as he waits browses the computer and waits to make or receive a call to or from someone with definitive information about Margot. The camera here isn't a passive observer. It's an active presence, zooming in on important text or a face. It gives us a much better appreciation for Cho's performance, as the face of a father's anguish is displayed in a tiny corner of the screen, blown up to take most of it, or communicated with some pause of activity on the computer.

The actual mystery, indeed, feels a bit superfluous compared to the parental revelations playing out in David's head (There's a blast of information in the third act that abandons the character's perspective for an objective, all-seeing one, simply to explain what has happened and is happening). That there is an intimately personal angle here—within a film that's mostly about watching someone interact with various devices—is a testament to Chaganty's storytelling abilities. Ultimately, Searching isn't just a gimmick. It's a legitimate, engrossing tale of how little a person might know about someone else—even in a world where information is a just click away.

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