August 25, 2018 3 min to read

Searching

Searching actually created pavlovian feelings of dread and suspense with the simple bells and dinging sounds a computer makes. Impressive.

by Zach Saul

The last 10 years have seen a million pandering projects about the role of the internet in people’s lives - but nothing even remotely like Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching. Remember on “The Office” when Jim tricks dwight into salivating at the sound of a computer bell? Searching follows Krazinski’s grand tradition…and the results are impressive.

Every shot in the movie is seen through the eyes of a computer - so all the information we get is from a video chat, a screencast, or a recorded memory being viewed on a desktop. It’s a simple, and seemingly insignificant set of rules - but Chaganty uses them to brilliant effect. For example, every time the audience sees the generic windows screensaver we know something terrible is about to happen.

Searching forces itself to operate under a stringent set of visual and cinematic rules - and while these rules limit the narrative complexity it’s capable of, they’re highly effective mechanisms for each “reveal”. Searching doesn’t have grand narrative ambitions - and it’s story and characters reflect that.

We meet David (John Cho) and Margot Kim (Michelle La) living an extremely mundane suburban life and mourning the death of Margot’s mother Pamela (Sara Sohm). David is desperately trying to connect with his daughter as she goes through her turbulent teenage years, but Margot wants no part of her father’s attempts at closeness. When Margot attends a study group late at night and doesn’t come home, David begins to worry something happened to Margot and slowly but surely loses his sanity.

When John calls the police he meets a deeply empathetic Detective Vick (Debra Messing), who’s eager to help him in ways far outside of her duties. Vick will call John in the middle of the night, discuss his personal anxieties with him at length and even . Messing is brilliant and crucial to the success of Searching as she manages to portray a creepiness and supreme competence simultaneously. the same anxious parenting tendencies that John has show up n manny of Vick’s behaviors and it’s likely they connected with one another because of those shared behaviors.

The Good: Searching has a lean tool belt - and relies on a smaller set of tricks - but uses them very effectively. Just about every shot in the movie feels very intentional, and Chaganty plays with timing just enough to suspend our disbelief in the most important moments, making the reveals all the more satisfying. Little details like freezing the frame on the mouse before it moves to open a window are extremely important in Searching because they project contemplative emotions onto otherwise static computer behaviors. Messing as Detective Vick in my opinion was the strongest character / performance in the movie, and is deserving of award consideration for “Best Supporting Actress”.

The Bad: The narrative in Searching left me wanting a bit more. I left the theatre with a deep understanding of David and Detective Vick’s motivations but a fragmented understanding of Margot’s character. Why did secretly sending money to an online stalker for months on end soothe her frustrations about her relationship with David? I would have appreciated more explanation about the connection between Margot’s mother’s death and her friendship with “fish-n-chips” (the stalker who pushed her off a cliff).