‘Searching’ Is a Solid Thriller for the Age of Screens

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What to Stream This Weekend

MOVIE: Searching
DIRECTOR: Aneesh Chaganty
CAST: John Cho, Debra Messing, Michelle La
AVAILABLE ON: Prime Video and iTunes

A father goes half-mad searching for his missing daughter in the 2018 film Searching, and while that’s not a novel concept for film or television, Searching makes sure to throw in as much technology and social media as humanly possible so that it’s crystal clear that this movie could only have been made in 2018. The entire film is presented via screens, which sounds not only like a nightmare scenario for techno-concerned parents but also a significant challenge for telling a story. But producer Timur Bekmambetov is no novice when it comes to this kind of gimmickry. He produced the 2015 teen horror movie Unfriended, which was surprisingly effective in springing scares on the audience via a tableau that saw a bunch of friends communicating via Skype, FaceTime, and Facebook, all while some kind of revenant demon starts offing them one by one.

Searching is even more ambitious in consuming every part of the media buffalo. It’s not exactly profound to say that we’re under the watchful eye of computers far more than even we realize. And so when David Kim’s texts to his daughter, Margot, go unanswered for too long, he starts digging through her computer to find the clues to her whereabouts. Pulling at that thread unravels a veritable secret life that his daughter has been carrying on, from social media sites to webcams to Venmo. If Searching nails any one concept, it’s the idea that we’ve fully reached the point where our entire lives can be captured and pieced together via the monitored digital paper trail we leave behind every day.

This would all feel more didactic than it needed to were it not for Cho holding things down so assuredly in the lead role. For a movie that keeps him mostly seated in front of a computer screen, Cho has a hugely arduous task in holding the audience’s attention while he pages through webcam search results and tries out passwords. He’s aided in his search by Detective Rosemary Vick, played by current TV star Debra Messing. Detective Vick is invested in finding Margot, though she’s almost comedically blunt at times in giving David the hard truths about the situation. There are several points in the middle of the film where you expect her and Cho’s characters to approach some kind of stress-induced romance, but Vick is ultimately too strange a character to accommodate it. Messing’s performance is … it defies easy description. At times you worry she doesn’t have enough ideas about the character to make her interesting; other times it’s clear she has a LOT of (too many?) ideas about the character. Either way, it’s a fun struggle to watch play out, especially in a movie that doesn’t ever really attain a villain.

Ultimately, the twists and turns that Margot’s disappearance take aren’t the most surprising, but they’re carried out with a surprising degree of panache. And there is one twist that happens after the big, game-changing one that had me incredulously squawking in the theater, so there’s that to look forward to.

One particularly noteworthy thing about Searching as it makes its way to VOD and beyond is that it’s the rare movie that actually feels like it’s most ideally viewed via streaming. Everything about David’s story is that we’re peering into his and Margot’s lives through the window of our computer screens. That authenticity is only enhanced when you’re watching it on your laptop or a tablet or even (…I know) a phone. You can feel like you’re on the case with Detective Debra Messing and everything.

Where to stream Searching