There was/still is (?) a question on the dating site OkCupid which asks users "Do you Google your date before you go out with them?" and the answers you could choose from were "Yes. Knowledge is power!" and "No. Why spoil the mystery?"
Anyone who answers "no" is, in my opinion, a fool. Or someone who doesn't care about the possibility of BEING MURDERED on a date! Or...perhaps worse...going out with a libertarian by accident. If it happened to me (the libertarian part, not the being murdered part), it can happen to you!
Searching for people on the Internet is a modern day pastime. Give me someone with a unique first name and their profession and I can find them. Give me someone's twitter and instagram handle and I now know their political persuasion and the names of their pets. And if you think it's creepy that I search for people on The Net, again, I'm just trying to stay sexy and not get murdered.
The film Searching is the first feature-length film by Aneesh Chaganty. It's a film with a gimmick that manages not to be gimmicky. The gimmick is that the film is shot from the point-of-view of smartphones, laptops, hidden camera, and news cameras. It's similar to the 2014 horror film Unfriended but, in my opinion, much more tense. It works.
Searching is absolute catnip for people who love true crime podcasts and documentaries and for anyone who has ever stalked anyone else on the internet. There are some hilarious moments, such as when David asks Margot's schoolmate "what is a tumbler" when she mentions Margot posted a lot on Tumblr. There's also an inadvertent (?) moment of humor when David sees the combination of the eggplant emoji and the water spraying emoji on one of Margot's instagram posts and the music swells to denote "DANGER SOMEONE IS SPRUNG FOR YOUR DAUGHTER!!" These moments of levity are crucial since the majority of the film is so tense I would pause with my hand hovering over my popcorn for minutes at a time.
There are twists and turns aplenty, none of which I'll go into here, but for once I didn't spoil the movie for myself and I was legitimately caught off guard multiple times when the movie suggested one course of direction and then violently swerved in another.
John Cho is excellent as the distressed father who is facing the possibility of losing his daughter on top of the loss of his wife. As the days pass without word from his daughter, he passes through naiveté, to confusion, to dread, to rage, and to hopelessness. He veers from sobbing on the floor to beating the shit out of people he thinks might have something to do with his daughter's disappearance. Cho is all grown up from his days of playing the pot-smoking, overly-conscientious Harold Lee in the Harold and Kumar films and he has the forehead grooves and under-eye bags to prove it. And this isn't a slight against his looks--the actor looks lived in, a real "dad" in the sense that he is absolutely someone you feel a sixteen year old girl would love fiercely...but also carefully keep secrets from.
Searching was a very pleasant surprise and may actually be the most purely entertaining film I've seen this year. I try to measure movies by both how "good" or "accomplished" they are, but also by how they make me feel in the moment. And while Searching may not be as "good" as some other movies that have come out this year, it definitely made me feel excited, tense, scared, delighted, and many other emotions as a watched a man uncover clues, one by one, about the secret online life of his daughter.
Grade: A-
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