"Searching" Review
"Searching" is a neat little thriller about a missing girl that takes place over laptop, and phone screens. In the movie, John Cho plays a father coping with the disappearance of his teenage daughter (Michelle La) while a detective (Debra Messing) is assigned to the case. Cho's charisma and empathy is hard to deny in this heartbreaking performance and plays well opposite Messing's detective Rosemary Vick.
This so called "screen life" genre (think the Unfriended movies) is a neat storytelling device and also serves as a great contemporary way to develop its characters and I was very much on board for the most part. Watching a character type out a message and replacing it with a different message while sifting through a myriad of relevant Google Chrome tabs is awesome. For once, a thriller is able to trust its audience with so much information and urges us to pay close attention. But then the movie decides to do everything in its power to hold us by the hand. I think that if the movie is so intricate in its set ups, the viewer will have no problems keeping up. Towards the end, it kept revisiting clues that we've seen many times before and it takes so long for the movie to get to the point that had already been clearly established. This is dumb and stands out in a competently constructed mystery. The movie is also hellbent on sticking to showing the entire story through different screens and news footage no matter the cost (to its detriment) and its final act does feel like a race to the finish line and I would've liked for the movie to have taken more time to wrap things up. There were also a lot of logistical issues I have with some of the reveals that would've worked in other mysteries but not in a mystery where social media and the internet is front and centre.
Searching is a slickly edited, well-acted, entry-level thriller that feels very emotional and has a lot of fun with its gimmick. The twists' reveals are clunky and extremely heavy handed and the pacing is a bit all over the place in its final act, but that being said, the movie is very much worth a watch on a big screen.