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Byron Shire
March 28, 2024

Cinema Review: Searching

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Unfriended (2014) led the way and set the bar pretty high for this new form of filmmaking, in which the story is told entirely on the screens of digital platforms (Facebook, email, Twitter, TV news etc). It was a horror flick aimed at a teen audience, whereas Searching is seeking an adult market with an otherwise orthodox investigation into a teenage girl’s disappearance. It starts with the back-story of how David Kim (John Cho) lost his wife to cancer when his daughter was a little girl. Fast forward to that daughter, Margot (Michelle La), supposedly at a study group with her high-school friends. David is in regular contact with her through texting, but she doesn’t come home and the next day there is no reply from her to any of his messages. The pleasing aspect of this online narrative is that you do not have to be tech savvy to follow what is happening (I am a virtual Luddite but kept up without trying). Though rapid-fire, the presentation is step-by-step, follow the prompts (which we do, like Pavlov’s dog) and it glues you to the screen with its short grabs. You are wholly onside with David as he stresses over the loss of the daughter whom he discovers he never really knew. It also helps that director Aneesh Chaganty has a cleverly constructed screenplay that takes you deeper and deeper into the cloudy world of cyberspace. At the heart of it all is a theme that predates keyboards and glowing screens by millennia – parental love and devotion. ‘What’s old is new again’ works every time. Cho gives a perfectly insightful performance as a ‘normal’ dad and La’s Margot, whom we never meet in ‘real life’, is absolutely there, waiting to be found. Introduced subtly into the drama is Peter (Joseph Lee), David’s brother, and Detective Vick (Debra Messing), who has her own, undisclosed reason for taking a personal interest in the case. The cut-and-paste genre might (like everything) become old hat before we know it, but for now Searching is a fantastic frontrunner.


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