In the thriller Searching, a Silicon Valley engineer David (Jon Cho) has been single-parenting his daughter since the death of his wife. The daughter, now sixteen, doesn’t come home. Has she run away? He she been abducted? Is she even still alive? Searching is a ticking clock thriller as David and the investigating police detective Vick (Debra Messing) race against time to solve the case. There are several red herrings, a couple major plot twists and one mega-surprise.
Here’s what is really different about Searching – the movie is entirely on the character’s screens – those of his computers, but also on smartphones, television, a security video and a live funeral cam. The sixteen year-old flashbacks are shown on a sixteen-year-old version of Windows desktop.
This is NOT a “gimmick movie”. It is a complete movie that writer-director Aneesh Chaganty has chosen to tell through this device. For example, Chaganty barely gives a glimpse of the comments on on-line news reports – and no character comments on them – but the audience finds them maddening and suffers the indignities along with David. In the same vein, I also enjoyed the recent teen horror Unfriended, also told on a computer screen, and the claustrophobic drama Locke, set in the driver’s seat of an auto.
Detective Vick asks David, “Who is your daughter and who does she talk with?”, which puts the spotlight on the movie’s theme. He’s her dad, and he was certain that he knows his daughter – but he finds out that, as a teenager, she has developed into an entirely new and unrecognizable person. Obviously, that revelation brings him enormous guilt to go along with the shock, but he throws himself into the search by grabbing her laptop and hacking her social media. As any good Silicon Valley parent, he opens a spreadsheet and starts filling it with what he finds out from the trail she has left online.
John Cho’s performance is pretty much perfect. Of course, he’s already achieved popular success in two movie franchises – as Harold in the Harold and Kumar stoner series and Sulu in Star Wars. Here, he gets a full-out, adult dramatic role and knocks it out of the park. Cho modulates David’s increasing tension and desperation through the story, and he is perfect in the flashback scenes, too.
Aneesh Chaganty is a San Jose native. Although he says that only two percent of the movie was actually filmed in San Jose, Searching really nails the vibe of Silicon Valley in 2018. Locals will unmask the very slight name changes to recognize the Sharks, the SJPD, Oakridge Mall, Evergreen/Silver Creek Highs and more. (The only egregious misstep is one character referencing Highway “101” in LA-speak as “the 101” .)
Searching can be streamed from Amazon (Starz channel), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.