REVIEW: Searching

To be honest, Aneesh Chaganty's Searching should not have worked.  It is a film ensconced in a gimmick, and gimmicks are barely enough to carry 1980s professional wrestlers, let alone wide release movies.  The movie is told through what is happening on a computer screen, with only a few moments where it rely's on footage that would be from a television broadcast.  Such a method should burry a movie in a hole of limitations, but Chaganty shows that he not only can manage the gimmick, but actually use it to enhance the story telling.

Searching follows David Kim (John Cho) as he tries to find out what happened to his daughter, Margot (Michelle La) when she mysteriously goes missing.  What we see is the screens of the computers that he uses to try and unravel not just her disappearance, but the daily life that she lived.  With David tragically losing his wife recently, he learns that his grief has kept him blind to the needs of his daughter.

This realization is well told through what we see.  Chaganty makes every move of a cursor link us to what is going through David's mind.  I really wouldn't have thought that this was possible, but it was through hesitations, deleting words in texts, and rapid clicking that give us an insight into the feelings of our protagonist.  We can understand what is going on, and tension is built through this as well.

Cho's performance in Searching is what really bridges this backdrop of technology with the viewing audience.  He has always been a very good talent, but this may be his best work.  The majority of what we see is digitized, and the humanity that he is able to put into the film is needed for this entire project to work.  Without a good performance from Cho, we are at best amused by watching a well done gimmick.  With the powerful acting of Cho, we feel the tension, the hope, and the desperation.

A lot of what we see in Searching is very clever use of technology in a way that makes sense to the audience.  This isn't someone who can hack into the national defence grid with an off the shelf laptop (as seems to be the case in many technology based films).  This is a person who uses actual methods that are realistic to the types of computers he is using.  You may be thinking, 'well, of course that would be the case,' but so many movies are unrealistic in their portrayal of what computers do and how people use them.  Often they can either magically do something, or oddly be unable to do another.  The fact that everything that we see happen is true to real life adds a lot to the film.

I often get upset when people say that there are rules to art.  There are some things that people say should never happen, and they instantly dismiss movies when they tread into those forbidden areas.  As much as I try not to be that person, it is easy to go down that road.  However, the most important thing is that we all need to be open minded when we watch something, willing to have our expectations changed by what we are witnessing.  Ultimately, I believe that pretty much anything can actually work in a movie.  There are those things that should be stayed away from as a general rule because they almost always lead to failure.  That doesn't mean that the right people with the right idea can't make them succeed.  This is the case with Searching.  It really should not have worked.  Not only did Aneesh Chaganty pull it off, but he was actually able to make the film stronger through the format he chose.  As much as I didn't think I would say this, Searching needed to be done in this format to have the powerful impact that it wields.

Rating - 3.5 out of 4 stars