Is John Cho's New Movie 'Searching' Any Good? Here's What The Reviews Say
DISTRACTED DAD BECOMES DIGITAL DETECTIVE
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In writer-director Aneesh Chaganty's debut feature "Searching," busy dad David Kim (John Cho) has to track down his missing daughter Margot (Michelle La). Though there's a detective (Debra Messing) on the case, it's Kim's digital sleuthing that makes real headway — with the audience point-of-view locked on his computer screen the entire time. Does this perspective make for gripping drama, or are you better off spending an afternoon scrolling at home? Here's what the reviews say:

Where 'Unfriended' Used Our Reliance On Tech For Scares, 'Searching' Uses It As The Basis For A Tense Thriller

A Bay Area native and former Google employee making a sharp, confident feature debut, Chaganty employs a formal gimmick that clearly reflects what he knows, but also what any 21st-century screen addict knows. Unfolding entirely on a series of computer and phone displays, "Searching" both captures and defamiliarizes an experience that most of us would consider mundane, even banal.

[Los Angeles Times]

It's worth watching just for the questions it raises about who we are in a digital world, and how real our virtual connections really are.

[Vox]

"Searching" is a clever update on a housebound Hitchcock thriller like "Rear Window," one that can make a series of Google searches play out like a high-wire action scene.

[The Atlantic]


Cho Puts In A Great Performance, Constraints Be Damned

A lot of what Cho does here consists of looking intent while scrolling through Tumblrs and Facebook pages, and I'm not being at all sarcastic to say that he does it well, conveying the entwined urgency and confusion of a man who finds himself on unfamiliar and ephemeral turf.

[The Ringer]

This gives John Cho a too-rare chance to hold the screen on his own, and he makes such a natural, empathetic everyman that the movie may well provoke frustration that he hasn't had more of these opportunities.

[The A.V. Club]

He runs the full gamut of fatherly emotions like a pro, escalating from mild panic to violent outrage, but the key to Cho's charisma, a quality that Hollywood seldom knows what to do with anymore, is that he can just sit there and still hold your attention. He may just be a guy in a plaid shirt mumbling into a webcam, but that doesn't make him any less of a movie star.

[Los Angeles Times]

We see everything his character is feeling, as he's feeling it. It's a startling experience, as if we're spying on him at his most vulnerable.

[RogerEbert.com]


At Its Best, The Screen Gimmick Pulls You Into The Movie

More often than not, the fact that we're watching an ersatz computer screen falls away completely, leaving only the drama of David's search. It feels impressively cinematic, which is no small feat, given the stylistic limitations.

[The Verge]

It's a true storytelling feat, married with sharp editing that makes the entire effort not only seamless, but also wholly intuitive. The use of real websites and social media platforms – from YouTube and Gmail to Facebook and Instagram – further sell the conceit, and the only true distraction the film offers is audio that can be billed as too good (the video, however, occasionally times out, real as anything).

[IndieWire]


It Keeps The Tension High — Doubly So For Parents

Practically everyone knows what it's like to go down the rabbit hole of the internet, to pursue links and connections and chains of thought leading who-knows-where, and the film, by sticking to what David keeps finding, reproduces this sort of web voyage of disturbing discovery.

[The Hollywood Reporter]

"Searching" is shockingly effective, not just in creating a sense of constant, palpable tension, but also in the way it pulls off authentic, effective emotional beats.

[The Verge]

It's that fear, of gaps between parents and children widening enough to swallow the kids up, that "Searching" exploits with canny skill — technically it's more thriller than horror movie, but for some parents it will constitute an 102-minute nightmare.

[The A.V. Club]

There Are Plenty Of Surprises And Twists Along The Way

There's a lot you're going to want to experience on your own, so I hesitate to describe too much more. But over and over again, Chaganty and Ohanian find innovative avenues into the laptop setting they've established, from David working backward to determine Margot's locked social media passwords to the spreadsheet he creates to interrogate her friends about her whereabouts.

[RogerEbert.com]

The twists in "Searching" come thick and fast, but so many of them hinge on unfounded assumptions that Margot might be buying something illicit, or hanging out with unsavory people — the kinds of assumptions many of us make whenever we use our computers.

[The Atlantic]

You Might Find That Chaganty Bites Off A Bit More Than He Can Chew With The Ending

An ambitious, well-executed premise, a fabulous turn from Cho — who's onscreen nearly the entire time — and a compelling, extremely timely meditation on the role of the internet in our lives are all positives that are nearly upended by the movie's weak plot and over-the-top resolution.

[Vox]

The final act of "Searching" is perhaps one step too ridiculous, but the film never devolves into the supernatural, the occult, or anything profoundly violent.

[The Atlantic]

The sheer volume of plot that has to be recapped via TV news footage is both understandable and disappointing, forcing the picture to behave like a more conventional thriller and muddying the crucial question of whose perspective we're following.

[Los Angeles Times]

If "Searching's" commitment to its gimmick results in sometimes clumsy and cumbersome storytelling, that's the price of ambition, and because so much of what's here works well, it's hard to hold these flaws against it.

[The Ringer]


Oh, And Don't Expect A Searing Indictment Of Tech

"Searching" doesn't set up technology as a menace. In the end, David's computer findings prove useful in ways nobody can anticipate. Technology may not be the answer to his search, but it definitely provides the tools he needs to get there.

[The Daily Beast]

[W]hereas the videos in "Unfriended" distorted, buffered, and froze — sometimes to create suspense but often just to resemble actual user experience — the images in "Searching," even when zoomed in, are almost always vivid, fluid, and lustrous. That, combined with the premise of a desperate father out-investigating a celebrated detective (Debra Messing) through common tools like Reddit and reverse image search, makes the film feel like an ad for big tech and its near-miraculous free services as much as the unexceptional but satisfying procedural that it is.

[Slate]


TL;DR

If "Searching's" commitment to its gimmick results in sometimes clumsy and cumbersome storytelling, that's the price of ambition, and because so much of what's here works well, it's hard to hold these flaws against it.

[The Ringer]


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