Searching (2018, Dir. Aneesh Chaganty):
I think right now we’re in an era of how to show technology in the content. We’ve seen the texts on the side on “House of Cards” when people are texting, we’ve seen all that … there is a way to cut into this stuff even in a normal live-action film that can feel like the style or tone of the film you’re making as a whole. It can be a rom-com, it can be a thriller, it can be a mystery, it can be a comedy. There’s a way to show this stuff and stay within the style and the conceit of your own film. Because this is the way that we live our lives.
— Aneesh Chaganty
Back in the prehistoric days of 1991, I participated in a hypertext writing workshop at Brown University, headed by Robert Coover. At the time, just the term “hypertext” had a gee-whiz, next-level feel to it, as if we were about to zoom off into a new universe of narrative and meaning. In the past, writers had to make do with the two-dimensionality of printed text, moving in linear fashion, A to B. Within those limits you could still have thrilling experiments that shattered chronology, such as Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch, but now we had the technology to click on a single word and be transported into a different section of story, or another story altogether. It was as if the lightning-quick currents of human thought, with all its random, intuitive connections and flows, was being represented in concrete form for the first time. The revolution was finally coming.
Three decades later, we’re mired in a morass of social media oversaturation, marketing spam, and outright trolling. (The revolution is dead, long live the revolution!) Still, the allure of connecting stray thoughts and snippets, combining byzantine tendrils to construct a narrative, is the engine that powers Searching, a new thriller that’s more clever than most entries in the genre. Restricted to video screens — whether it’s the various desktop and phone screens of besieged father David Kim (John Cho), surveillance cameras, animated representations of Google maps, or snippets from live news footage, the film tells a complete story within the parameters of multimedia. No surprise that Searching is produced by Timur Bekmambetov, who pulled off a similar stunt in the horror movie Unfriended (2015), but this time he has legit Silicon Valley cred behind the camera, as Aneesh Chaganty, a former commercial director at Google, and his partner/co-writer Sev Ohanian have fashioned a film that speaks directly to our obsessions, and fears, in the social media age.
The film kicks off with a montage that deftly pulls double-duty. It tells the story of David’s family and the tragic death of his wife Pam (Sara Sohn), which leaves him sole caretaker of his daughter Margot (Michelle La), and it also cleverly plays on our knowledge of how Internet technology has evolved to denote the passage of time, ushering us from Windows 2000 to the present day via increasingly sophisticated photos, shared videos, posts, emails, and calendar updates. As the story proper begins, Margot is now an AP high schooler and pianist, and David a proud but emotionally distant parent — but when Margot goes missing, any illusions David has about the person she is are torn down as he hacks her laptop and invades her social mediasphere to discover what happened to her, and in the process, who she really is.
As we accompany David on his odyssey through passwords, privacy settings, and deleted accounts, following an electronic trail towards a potentially shattering conclusion, the film is careful to play by the rules it sets for itself. Save for a few conference call video screens that linger longer than they would in reality, almost every bit of Internet legerdemain we witness stays within plausible bounds. The script is stolid rather than memorable, but this is a film where form is privileged over content, and on that score, it’s a triumph (it’s surprising that such a tidy, neat conceit for a thriller has never been used before). At its best, Searching cleverly utilizes the lingua franca of computer life for dramatic effect. Scattered photos, notes and text messages all but obscure a family desktop picture, neatly illustrating David’s obsession. A screensaver becomes an eerie scene transition, hinting that evil is afoot. The dreaded “Are you sure you want to shut down?” pop-up window becomes a taunt and turning point.
The script also contains sly cultural subtext, as Margot’s disappearance rapidly becomes every model minority parent’s worst nightmare. David uncovers a multitude of escalating transgressions: stolen family money, a connection with a skeezy white-boy gangsta, and even possible incest and drug use. For every layer pulled back, another one emerges: enigmatic live-stream sessions, a crime scene photo that points suspicion towards David’s slacker brother Peter (Joseph Lee). Soon Margot’s disappearance becomes a local cause célèbre, unleashing the full power of the Internet. Hashtags and subreddit conspiracy theories abound, heartless trolls come out to play, and the usual poisonous social media atmosphere threatens to crush David’s spirit. Holding the screen (so to speak) for nearly the entire movie, Cho puts in a powerhouse performance, running the emotional gamut from awkward reserve to pure despair. His trials can be taken as a cautionary tale for inexpressive Asian-American dads everywhere: avoid connecting with your children at your peril.
Searching has a lot of elements to keep track of, and we haven’t even mentioned Debra Messing as a semi-sympathetic police detective, her performance oddly calibrated, as if she just stumbled off the set of Will and Grace and was handed the script minutes before. Nevertheless, Chaganty pulls off the juggling act for most of the film’s running time. The story stumbles a bit down the stretch; the ultimate solution to the mystery is comprehensible enough, but doesn’t have much of a dramatic or poetic kick. Visual evidence that should have been noted or acted upon earlier in the film is trotted out only when the tension needs a kick-start. Margot presents a fabricated version of herself in the real world and is open about who she is on the Internet—but rather than dive into the inherent darkness contained within that set-up, the film argues for veracity in online life as the way to salvation. The notion that you should present truth and transparency in your livestream might be admirable, but given what we know about what the Internet can do with you and your information, the sentiment also comes off as naïve. Such is the risk of a movie that relies so heavily on visual impact—Searching ultimately insists that what you see is what you get, but we’re too jaded to believe that what we see can tell us everything.
Despite these flaws, Searching is a fluid, creative piece of work. If all the twists and turns of the plot tend to evaporate afterwards, much like the nondescript title of the film, well, that’s the nature of the Internet—what we do online can mean everything at one moment, and disappear into the ether in the next. But if nothing else, the movie points towards more innovative possibilities, where the language of film can expand to incorporate multimedia elements in dynamic ways—not a bad trick to pull off in a world where hypertext is often taken for granted. ■
