Searching (2018)
Directed by Aneesh Chaganty
After David Kim's 16-year-old daughter goes missing, a local investigation is opened and a detective is assigned to the case. But 37 hours later and without a single lead, David decides to search the one place no one has looked yet, where all secrets are kept today: his daughter's laptop.
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21 films that influenced Searching
What critics say influenced Searching
In sort of a high-tech version of the devastating, wordless opening of “ Up ,” we see David and his wife Pamela ( Sara Sohn ) raising Margot over the years through a series of photos, videos and calendar entries.
After an opening montage that introduces us to the Kim family (and evokes “Up” and its simple emotions), we see the groove that father David (Cho) and teenager daughter Margot (Michelle La) have gotten into.
It does this by launching with a montage that’s basically the famous opening sequence of Up, if those scenes from a life had all been captured and narrated through the internet.
Much like Pixar’s 2009 Up , the film opens with an emotionally devastating montage of the passage of time, and of lives, setting up an expectation of poignancy not always matched by what follows.
The movie begins with a moving montage, almost like it’s ripped from Pixar’s Up (who can ever forget those devastating four minutes?), that plays out through old footage on a computer screen, and it immediately gets the viewer up to date on the visual language of the film.
Basically, it's the opening to Up , attached to the opening of a gimmick-driven kidnapping thriller, and it is very fucking weird.
Unfriended, which was released in 2015 after a festival run, used the same screen gimmick to much gorier effect, chronicling the revenge of a bullied teen’s angry spirit on the students who tormented her.
There have already been a few others: the rightly little-seen 2014 thriller Open Windows did something similar; and there was the appalling Unfriended sequel, Dark Web, just earlier this summer.
Like 2015 horror picture “ Unfriended ,” missing-person film “Searching” unfolds entirely on a computer screen – in FaceTime conversations, text messages, news footage, and Google deep dives, all giving the film’s title an apt double meaning.
The first time, to my incomplete knowledge, that the gimmick of showing a horror movie entirely through the form of what happens on a computer screen was in the 2012 found footage anthology V/H/S , in the segment "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger", and it has been a few times since: 2013's The Den, 2014's Unfriended and its 2018 in-name-only sequel .
Other computer thrillers have hit theaters before Searching (2014‘s Open Windows, 2014’s Unfriended and the 2018 sequel Unfriended: Dark Web), but it’s safe to say that this film is much more inventive and strikes some important and sympathetic themes.
The new thriller Searching is a lot like the 2015 horror movie, Unfriended.
There have already been a few others: the rightly little-seen 2014 thriller Open Windows did something similar; and there was the appalling Unfriended sequel, Dark Web, just earlier this summer.
Other computer thrillers have hit theaters before Searching (2014‘s Open Windows, 2014’s Unfriended and the 2018 sequel Unfriended: Dark Web), but it’s safe to say that this film is much more inventive and strikes some important and sympathetic themes.
Nacho Vigalondo demostró que no se le resiste nada y entregó en Open Windows la angustiosa odisea de un chaval (Elijah Wood) acosado por un hacker mientras espía a su actriz favorita (la reina del cine para adultos Sasha Grey) desde su portátil.
Una compleja sistemática ya utilizada por Levan Gabriadze en la estupenda Eliminado (2014), aún antes por su pionero en el largometraje, Nacho Vigalondo, en Open Windows (2014), y, desde luego, por los fundadores del procedimiento narrativo, Patrick Cederberg y Walter Woodman, en el corto Noah (2013).
While Italian gore-meister Nacho Vigalondo technically got there first the same year with the Elijah Wood–starring Open Windows, the creative team behind Unfriended perfected the style on the first try.
While the concept of unfolding the story primarily over a computer screen is less innovative in the wake of the opening act of 2010's " Catfish ," as well as 2014's " Open Windows ," 2015's " Unfriended ," and 2018's " Unfriended: Dark Web ," writer-director Chaganty and co-writer Sev Ohanian use it in a natural, dramatically sound way.
A movie such as Searching, unfortunately, will be copied and re-copied for years to come until Hollywood studios have exhausted its originality – see the found-footage subgenre after The Blair Witch Project debuted almost 20 years ago.
Back in 1999, The Blair Witch Project took the hoariest of ghost stories and made its familiar horror tropes scary again thanks to the thrilling way it utilised the then novel "found footage" style.
“Searching” (initially titled “Search”) is one of those movies, like “Tarnation” or “The Blair Witch Project,” so unique in its approach that Sundance can only program something of its kind once before the gimmick gets old — in this case, a taut missing-persons investigation that unfolds entirely on computer screens.
Scooped up by Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions after premiering in Sundance’s Next section, the directional debut of Aneesh Chaganty will draw comparisons to everything from The Blair Witch Project to 2014’s Unfriended .
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Like Searching, it was produced by Timur Bekmambetov, the Russian Kazakh director of action hits such as Night Watch and Wanted who has seemingly transitioned into the extremely specific world of computer-screen thrillers .
It’s not as if this is we have to deal with a ridiculous computer like the one infested by the devil in 1981’s “Evilspeak.”
The same way Paranormal Activity is essentially a haunted house movie or Cloverfield is essentially an alien invasion movie, Searching is a Hitchcockian mystery, which uses the computer screen format in the same way that Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield employed the found footage technique.
So it’s only fitting that films start to wander down that path as well, because when people stop showing up to found footage garb like the 17th “Paranormal Activity” studios want to seek out the next best gimmick.
While both critics and audiences took note of its unique computer screenshot style, at a time when the Paranormal Activity wave of found footage horror was nearing its end, there was a definite feeling that this was an idea that could be expanded upon.
The young love John Hughes depicted in “Sixteen Candles” speaks to teenagers of all races.
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While the concept of unfolding the story primarily over a computer screen is less innovative in the wake of the opening act of 2010's " Catfish ," as well as 2014's " Open Windows ," 2015's " Unfriended ," and 2018's " Unfriended: Dark Web ," writer-director Chaganty and co-writer Sev Ohanian use it in a natural, dramatically sound way.
Like Searching, it was produced by Timur Bekmambetov, the Russian Kazakh director of action hits such as Night Watch and Wanted who has seemingly transitioned into the extremely specific world of computer-screen thrillers .