Searching Review

Late August is always a low period when it comes to movies. The reasoning there is that it's the beginning of the awkward phase between the height of the summer movie season and the holiday/awards season. Studios don't release their big titles in late August. Because of that, there was a period of of about nearly a month where I didn't get a review written from a movie I saw in theaters. The only movie I reviewed in between "Crazy Rich Asians" in mid-August and "The Nun" last week was "The Last Sharknado," and that was a TV movie. I suppose I could've gone and seen "Alpha," "Mile 22," "A.X.L.," "Kin" and/or "Operation Finale," but I didn't have enough motivation to see any of those. Some of those I might catch up on later. And I certainly wasn't going to give "The Happytime Murders" even one second of my time. But there are plenty of more titles from this month to look at as well as a full slate through the end of the year that should make it so that we're full speed ahead. However, there is one movie that was essentially the black sheep of late August. I say that because it's an indie thriller from Sundance that didn't belong in the late August lull. However, ScreenGems got their hands on it and put it there anyways, so here we are with the review.

"Searching" was released in nine theaters in August 24 and expanded nationwide the following week on August 31. I saw it somewhere around that nationwide expansion, I think on a Thursday night screening on August 30. I suppose ScreenGems put it in that date range because they had success with "Don't Breathe" in August 2016. Normally when I personally think of ScreenGems, I think lazy and awful, which is why I was strange seeing their logo in front of a good movie for a change. I think "Don't Breathe" and "Searching" are the only two good movies they've distributed. The rest include "No Good Deed," "The Perfect Guy," "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," "When the Bough Breaks," "Proud Mary" and "Slender Man," so forgive me for normally not being excited about a ScreenGems thriller. But again, this was initially a Sundance film, so that's why I've had my eye on it for a while. After seeing it nearly three weeks ago, why am I just now getting around to writing my review? Honestly when I walked out of the theater, one of my first thoughts was, "How in the heck do I write this review?" Normally reviews are pretty basic, but when it comes to a twisty, mysterious thriller, anything I say could be considered a spoiler that ruins the experience, so I got stumped.

If any of you have seen the Studio C skit "Spoiler Alert," this is exactly how I feel right now and how I have felt since walking out of the theater. If you haven't seen that, search it right now on YouTube and you'll get me. So what do I say? I almost want to simply recommend you go see it if you enjoy a smart thriller that keeps you guessing throughout. It can get a bit dark, but it's only PG-13, so it's more user-friendly when compared to other thrillers that are similar. If that's good enough for you, then perhaps my job here is done. If I've already spoiled the whole movie for you based on me simply saying that I like it and that it's a smart thriller, then I sincerely apologize. I will continue to attempt a full review, but from here on out I'm going to give the warning that you may want to simply not read this review if you are excited about this movie until after you've seen it. From that, I suppose the next logical thing is to give you a premise. The general premise here is pretty basic. We have a father, mother and daughter living a seemingly normal life. A thing happens to the mother that transforms our happy family into a less happy family with just a father and daughter living together. Then the daughter goes missing, leaving the father all alone to figure out what happened to his life.

The first major theme I'll spoil here is what the trailer already gave away. The disconnect between parent and child that can happen without the parent realizing it. This is honestly a really sad story because the father honestly thought that he was doing a good job raising his daughter, all things considered, but then comes to the depressing realization that he didn't know his daughter at all. She really needed him, but he wasn't there for her. He thought he was. And he did his best. But he just didn't have the full knowledge or comprehension of how to be there for her and so she secretly drifted away into a different lifestyle without him knowing about them. Then when the world collapses from under her and she ends up missing, that lifestyle is brought to the forefront as the investigation team, along with her father, dig into the harsh realities of her past in order to figure out why she's gone missing. Sometimes the truth can hurt. Thus I think that this movie has the power to be very eye-opening to a lot of people, especially parents with kids of their own, and even more especially if said kids are in high school. You might think you know everything about your children, but do you really?

I think there's an especially deep connection to the idea of trying to be a single parent. A child often needs both parents in order to progress. A father and a mother bring very different things to the table that are critical to a child's development. But when one parent either leaves or passes away, the remaining parent can struggle to properly raise the child. That's why I think John Cho does an excellent job in this movie as a single father trying his best to raise a teenage daughter. He brings a lot of charm and charisma to the table here and you care for him. You fully believe that he's an excellent husband and father, but when he's forced to fly solo, he does an excellent job of acting like a normal human being. Parents are far from perfect even when they have each other to lean on. But when you lose your spouse and have to raise a child on your own, that's a difficult task. When he approaches certain people who bluntly tell him how much he's failed in raising his daughter, well, they're kinda right. He did a lot of things wrong that could've potentially prevented this situation. But at the same time, he's only human and was doing the best he could, yet has to face the harsh realities that his daughter might be gone and there's nothing he can do to fix that. He also makes plenty of mistakes during the investigation, but at the same time he acts in a way that many might act.

Thus these themes transformed this movie from your typical missing person mystery investigation to a surprisingly deep and thought-provoking film. Even in moments where you can say it's a bit by-the-numbers, it's a lot more than that due to the execution of the plot and the excellent performances from the cast. Now in speaking about taking a basic by-the-numbers premise and making it original, the style of this movie is rather fascinating as it's all told through computer screens and social media pages. Every time you see the father, or any character for that matter, it's from the viewpoint of a computer or phone, usually through face time. The movie also spends a lot of time on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and various other social media platforms. And it's not discount versions of these in order to avoid copyright. It's the actual social media sites, meaning they probably paid a good premium in order to use all of them. And the way they used them in the movie are extremely clever in ways that I'll let you experience on your own. But there's a lot of attention spent on the details of each page and each site that manages to keep your attention for the entire time, thus the movie is able to avoid feeling like a gimmick and rather becomes extremely creative and clever.

I don't know exactly what to label this style as. It has been done before in the movie "Unfriended" and its sequel that came out this summer of which few people saw. But I like to call it a more modern take on the found footage genre. Social media found footage, if you will. Found footage is the style of movie where the main character carries around a camera for the whole time, usually with the intention of making a documentary or filming their lives, like "The Blair Witch Project" or "Paranormal Activity." But in 2018 that's outdated because no one carries a camera around all the time. So updating the genre with social media pages and other computer-related applications instead of a physical camera is a smart idea. If this idea catches on and lots of movies start using this idea, then the novelty might wear off. But at the moment, it feels fresh and new. And I think thematically it fits in because much of the movie is about the disconnect between a father and a daughter. Showing that disconnect by using social media and computers is really smart, because we get to see how the father isn't able to understand his daughter's generation with how he uses his computer and browses the internet rather than simply being told through dialogue.

My biggest problem with this style in "Searching" is the same problem I had with the movie "Chronicle" with its usage of found footage. For most of "Chronicle," the use of found footage was completely justified. But towards the end, the narrative didn't lend itself to found footage because there were certain instances where you simply would not be carrying around a camera and filming. Thus "Chronicle" had to take some shortcuts to finish the story by jumping from various street cameras and whatnot connect the dots. And that's the same thing with "Searching." Not only does the father spend an awful lot of time face timing the detective on his case because the narrative required it, but at times when they were out in the field searching without their computers and phones, the movie was pushed a corner a bit because they committed themselves to this style, so they taped things together with breaking news stories on the internet that filled in the gaps. And that was fine, but it was those points in the movie where the style no longer fit the narrative. I certainly commend them for their dedication, but it was pushing it a bit in these scenes, especially since the story of this daughter went a lot more viral than it probably would've in real life.

But these are more nitpicks than anything. I think this movie has a lot of poignant themes regarding parenthood and relationships in general. There's a strong sense of humanity to this movie that I think a lot of people are going to be able to connect with on a very personal level. I think it's going to cause people to look at all of the people in their lives, whether it be children, parents, friends, classmates, coworkers, siblings or associates and cause them to wonder how well they know the people around them and make them wonder if there's more that they could be doing to build these relationships that they might not be properly building at the present time. And in speaking about this, I've only scratched the surface with this movie. There's a lot more characters in this movie and a lot more plot to discuss that I am simply avoiding. In fact, this whole review has been mostly a deep dive into the first portion of this movie and I allowed myself to go deep into this initial section because I don't know how to discuss anything else without spoiling the movie. I want to tell you my reactions to the middle section of the movie and especially to the ending, but my hands are tied and I'm just going to have to leave you hanging. All that I'm going to say is that my grade is a 9/10.