searching movie review

We’ve seen this gimmick before: the high-wire act of setting a movie entirely within the confines of electronic devices, allowing us to feel as if we’re logging in, clicking and typing along with the characters in real time. The 2015 horror flick “ Unfriended ,” for example, pulled off this feat in lively, detailed and eventually grisly ways; before that, the 2014 Elijah Wood thriller “ Open Windows ” tried this trick with less success. 

Structuring a film this way is impressive as an ambitious screenwriting exercise, if nothing else. It also gives filmmakers the opportunity to embrace technology while simultaneously making a point about the way it transfixes us and turns us into zombies. The sensation allows us to identify with these characters as they make the same kinds of decisions we would and multitask with a variety of windows and websites open at the same time. We are them and they are us and everyone needs to put down the phone or close up the laptop and go for a walk in the outside world—or at least set our devices to airplane mode and turn the ringer off, if only for a little while.

With “Searching,” director Aneesh Chaganty and his co-writer, Sev Ohanian adhere to their central conceit in ways that are consistently clever, yet ultimately wander a bit astray. But what sets their film apart from others of its ilk is its dramatic underpinning. “Searching”—a title that has double meaning—follows a panicked father’s online moves as he tries to track down his missing teenage daughter. It aims for and earns genuine emotion rather than cheap thrills.

The ever-versatile John Cho shows great range and takes us on an intimate, gripping journey as David Kim, a widower raising his 16-year-old daughter, Margot ( Michelle La , in her first major role), in suburban San Jose, Calif. 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. (In a nice touch, fonts and graphics change as technology evolves and improves.) “Searching” smoothly and efficiently depicts the passage of time, including Pamela’s cancer battle. The film handles the tragedy of her passing with quiet poignancy.

In the present day, David and Margot live busy lives between work and school, and they mostly communicate through text messages and FaceTime calls. But one night, the usually conscientious Margot fails to come home after a study group session, something David doesn’t realize until well into the next day. And here’s where the intricacies of the technology have such an impact: We can see all those unanswered text messages from him just sitting there, ominously, lined up in a long, green column. We can see the time stamp of the last phone call Margot made to him in the middle of the night. We can feel David’s fear growing because ours is, too.

“Searching” takes a series of twists and turns from here as David contacts police and a full-blown effort begins to find Margot. 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. Through it all, he remains methodical, but his rising anxiety is inescapable. Cho spends a lot of time in medium shot or close-up in a split screen with whatever he’s working on, so there’s nowhere for him to hide. 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.

The arrival of a determined Debra Messing as the police detective investigating Margot’s disappearance changes the film’s energy, providing a ray of hope. (David naturally looks up her character, Det. Rosemary Vick, on Google and Facebook the first time she calls him, seeking traces of trustworthiness.) But the more they uncover together, from Margot’s secret Tumblr posts to the last place her car was seen, the more David realizes he didn’t really know his only child. It’s the sad paradox of technology, a tool that’s meant to bring people closer together, that it also can foster such a divide. Not the most novel concept, perhaps, but one that “Searching” explores in smart, slickly paced ways.

But as the film pulses toward its conclusion, it introduces images and information that deviate from the premise that we’re seeing everything from David’s perspective. A narrative omniscience occurs that fills in some holes, but it also results in a loss of tautness and focus. (I do appreciate that the filmmakers got the geography of the Bay Area correct, though, as well as the mic flags of the local TV stations breathlessly covering every development of the search effort.) ‘Til the end, though, we’re deeply invested in these well-drawn characters, and whether they’ll find their happy ending both online and IRL.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series “Ebert Presents At the Movies” opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

• Joseph Lee as Peter
• Debra Messing as Detective Rosemary Vick
• John Cho as David Kim
• Michelle La as Margot
• Aneesh Chaganty
• Sev Ohanian

Cinematographer

• Juan Sebastian Baron

Cinematographer (director of virtual photography)

• Nicholas D. Johnson
• Will Merrick
• Torin Borrowdale

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After his teenage daughter goes missing, a desperate father tries to find clues on her laptop. After his teenage daughter goes missing, a desperate father tries to find clues on her laptop. After his teenage daughter goes missing, a desperate father tries to find clues on her laptop.

• Aneesh Chaganty
• Sev Ohanian
• Debra Messing
• 1.3K User reviews
• 263 Critic reviews
• 71 Metascore
• 6 wins & 10 nominations

Top cast 46

• Detective Vick

• Pamela Nam Kim

• Young Margot (5 yrs)

• Young Margot (7 yrs)

• Young Margot (9 yrs)

• Michael Porter
• Mrs. Shahinian

• Isaac's Mom

• 911 Operator

• (as Joseph K. Shirle)

• Margot's Friend #1

• Margot's Friend #2
• (as Courtney Cummings)

• Margot's Friend #7

• Margot's Friend #11
• (as a different name)
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• Trivia For the German, Spanish, French, Russian, Italian and Portuguese versions of the movie, every TV/phone/computer screen was recreated in its respective language, as well as every typing sequence, keystroke by keystroke.
• Goofs While Margot is driving in her a Camry, a sunroof is seen above her head. When the Camry is pulled out of the lake, there is no sunroof on that car.

David Kim : I didn't know her. I didn't know my daughter.

• Connections Featured in Projector: Searching (2018)

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• stuartwoodley-58722
• Aug 18, 2018
• How long is Searching? Powered by Alexa
• August 31, 2018 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
• Official Facebook (alt)
• Truy Tìm Tung Tích Ảo
• Screen Gems
• Stage 6 Films
• Bazelevs Production
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $880,000 (estimated)
• $26,020,957
• Aug 26, 2018
• $75,462,037

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• Runtime 1 hour 42 minutes

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The emotional thriller Searching proves good computer-screen movies aren’t a fluke

The producer of unfriended returns with a movie that proves there’s life left in this formula.

By Bryan Bishop

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Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was originally posted after the film’s premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, where it played under the title Search . It has been updated for the film’s wide theatrical release.

In 2015, the movie Unfriended landed in theaters , telling a conventional supernatural revenge story with an unconventional conceit: the entire film took place on the screen of one character’s laptop. That approach really shouldn’t have worked, but Unfriended was nevertheless a creepy, unsettling, low-budget success. When I spoke with producer Timur Bekmambetov at the time, he envisioned “screen movies” as an entire genre.

The filmmaker is taking his next big swing at the format with Searching, starring Star Trek ’s John Cho and Will & Grace ’s Debra Messing. It’s the story of a father who frantically tries to find his daughter when she goes missing — only this time, the film doesn’t just take place on a single laptop. It takes place on the screens of multiple computers, with an iPhone thrown into the mix for good measure. Once again, this is an idea that shouldn’t work. But Searching is a taut, surprisingly emotional ride. It doesn’t entirely stick the landing, but it’s proof the screen-movie concept isn’t just a one-off fluke.

What’s the genre?

Bekmambetov might have described it as “a screen movie” a couple of years ago, but now, Searching can just be considered a straight-up thriller.

What’s it about?

David Kim (Cho) is recently widowed, and he’s been having a hard time connecting with his teenage daughter Margot (Michelle La). One morning, David wakes up to find he’s missed several late-night FaceTime calls from Margot. As the day unfolds, he discovers she’s not at school, and never even came home the night before. Detective Rosemary Vick (Messing) is assigned to the case, and with her help, David begins digging through his daughter’s computer, her search history, and the live-streaming services he never knew she used. They initially suspect she might have simply run away, but as the evidence piles up, it seems likely that something sinister has happened to Margot.

What’s it really about?

Director Aneesh Chaganty, who co-wrote the script with producer Sev Ohanian, has a couple of themes on his mind with Searching . Writ large, it’s a movie about the way we deal with grief. David shut down emotionally in response to his wife's death, compartmentalizing his memories to the point of forgetting her birthday, and hiding any videos that might spark painful memories from his computer’s search results. While he thinks Margot has been doing okay, as he investigates, he slowly realizes she has been struggling more than he ever realized.

Searching also illustrates how we sometimes use online outlets and social networks to express feelings that would perhaps be better discussed in real life. Margot is comfortable talking about her mom to anonymous strangers on a video chat, but doesn’t want to bring up the issue with her own father, which pushes them further and further apart.

Is it good?

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 first five minutes of the film tell the entire backstory of the Kim family, opening with the mom’s computer (running Windows XP) as the family starts documenting Margot’s young life. Through video clips, glimpses of emails, and calendar schedules, we learn that in the ensuing years, Margot’s mother got cancer, fought it into remission, suffered a relapse, and finally succumbed just as Margot was about to start high school. It’s legitimately affecting. (Think the opening prologue of Pixar’s Up , only told through a computer screen.) By the time Searching catches up with the present, and the iMac the family uses at home, the movie has set up an emotional foundation that propels the rest of the film.

the fact that we’re watching an ersatz computer screen falls away completely

As a filmmaker, Chaganty knows a few things about merging technology with filmmaking. He shot an early Google Glass commercial called “Seeds,” and was responsible for some of the snarky ads for Google Photos . But here, he moves beyond those early experiments, and what was accomplished in previous computer screen projects like Unfriended or the Modern Family episode “Connection Lost.” Searching ’s rhythm and pacing stand out, from the way the camera punches in and moves around computer screens to the way it creatively adds new angles to the mix, while still adhering to its basic conceit. 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. Cho also delivers a strong performance, capturing the denial, grief, and anger David experiences as the situation with his daughter becomes increasingly more dire.

The film does have its flaws. Messing’s performance seems out of sync with the rest of the actors at times, as if she’s playing scenes from a much more melodramatic TV show. (The script does give her character some of the clunkiest lines, so there’s only so much she can do.) And while Searching has several moments where it feels like things are wrapping up in a truly unexpected, yet emotionally satisfying way, the film unfortunately doesn’t know when to call it quits. It finally comes to a conclusion with an extended coda that really tests the audience’s suspension of disbelief, and while the movie ultimately delivers a final moment that some audiences will definitely be craving, the way it gets there is easily the weakest part of the film.

What should it be rated?

Searching through Facebook, creating Google Docs, and making FaceTime calls is pretty family-friendly. Let’s call this a PG, given the general subject matter.

How can I actually watch it?

After the world premiere screening at Sundance, Sony picked up the movie for a reported $5 million, and brought it to theaters for a wide release. It’s out on August 24th.

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Searching Reviews

Going against the Heightened Realism 101 rulebook in films of this kind, Chaganty underlines his storytelling with a terrific score and appropriate rhythm-heavy editing.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 9, 2024

The writing is amazing, the use of technology is great, and it doesn't feel cheesy as it has in past films.

Full Review | Jul 8, 2024

Searching is an unnerving and touching movie that goes well beyond the gimmick of being told through a computer screen.

Full Review | Feb 1, 2024

A tremendously unique style of filmmaking elevates an almost seamlessly written mystery, containing constant twists and puzzling clues that leave the audience captivated throughout the entire runtime.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 24, 2023

If you like suspense movies, innovation, and John Cho you do not want to miss the movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Jan 17, 2023

A mystery that’s far meatier than its virtual framing would suggest.

Full Review | Sep 14, 2022

It’s a riveting thriller with interesting things to say about the online lives we live. It’s also another showcase for John Cho who carries the film through his character’s intensifying stages of emotion and desperation.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 25, 2022

Chaganty's unsubtle approach broadcasts every clue, relying on a tired formula where every detail onscreen proves significant in a dull way. Attentive viewers will see the twists coming.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 11, 2022

Here's hoping future films in this new mode of storytelling take note from what Searching does so well and avoid what doesn't exactly mesh.

Full Review | Feb 11, 2022

Episode 6: Bourbon and Smoke

Full Review | Original Score: 50/100 | Aug 28, 2021

This is screenwriting at its finest. The film just gives you one emotional punch after the next the suspense just builds and builds as more details about the mystery are revealed.

Full Review | Original Score: 9.5/10 | Aug 17, 2021

Searching is a clarion call for any parent of a teen...

Full Review | Aug 13, 2021

It's a little too conventional in its climax and conclusion but John Cho's terrific performance and some genuine thrills elevate the story past its visual gimmick.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 4, 2021

Ultimately, it's among the very best of this genre of computer screen thrillers, and I'll leave it up to you to decide how much you think that means.

Full Review | Feb 9, 2021

David Kim discovers that his 16-year-old daughter Margot didn't come home after a study session, and he searches her laptop and social media to find her.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 2, 2021

A concept that easily could have come across as cheap and tacky instead elevates Searching in ways that are exciting and surprisingly moving.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jan 29, 2021

Sometimes, your expectations for a film can enrich your experience or cripple it. With Searching, I was thrown for a loop in the best way.

Full Review | Nov 10, 2020

Searching is both an immersive and ingenious experience and because it is Aneesh Chaganty's directorial debut, one could only hope that he's got even more creative ideas on the horizon.

Full Review | Oct 5, 2020

Searching is unlike any modern thriller I've seen, and actually knows how to do social media and the online world right, without being gimmicky.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 3, 2020

What places Searching a cut above the average thrillers filling the multiplex every weekend is the resonance of the relationship between David and Margot.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2020

Film Review: ‘Searching’

Intricately designed and innovatively told, Aneesh Chaganty's clever missing-persons mystery stars John Cho as a father desperately trying to find his daughter from behind a computer screen.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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“ 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. Good thing then that first-time feature director Aneesh Chaganty has concocted such an exceptionally clever riff on that idea. Cutting to the emotional core of what social media says about us, the result is as much a time capsule of our relationship to (and reliance upon) modern technology as it is a cutting-edge digital thriller.

No wonder then that Sony shelled out $5 million for worldwide rights to a film that others will surely be imitating for years to come. Not that Chaganty invented the big-screen-as-computer-screen conceit — that approach has already been quite lucrative for Timur Bekmambetov, who produced both “Searching” and the “Unfriended” franchise, with countless others trying similar stunts. Here, the genre element should get audiences in the door, rewarding them with twist after twist as “Searching” unfolds, though Chaganty’s smartest move was to ground the story in something so human as a strong father-daughter relationship.

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Booting up with a 15-year tour through the Kim family’s recent past, “Searching” rivals the opening montage of Pixar’s “Up” for sheer heart-wrenching impact. This bravura sequence zooms into relevant portions of the screen as proud dad David ( John Cho ) pilots the cursor, sampling from YouTube videos, email messages, calendar appointments, etc., to recap the early milestones in the life of daughter Margot (played by Michelle La in the present). In a nice touch, a simple melody from her early piano recitals provides the music, which turns melancholy when mom Pamela (Sara Sohn) is diagnosed with a terminal case of lymphoma.

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Feeling: teary-eyed emoji. Seldom can a film put audiences through such a roller-coaster of emotions within the span of its first few minutes, and yet Chaganty earns what might have felt like manipulation in someone else’s hands, using Pamela’s death to inform the concerned-parent dynamic David, now a widower, shows toward his daughter, now a 16-year-old high school student — old enough to keep secrets, but so responsible he rarely has to worry where she is. Until the night she disappears.

“Searching” parcels out clues so discretely we hardly recognize them as such (except for the in-joke “Home of the Catfish” sign glimpsed in the background of one family photo). Instead, familiar conversations about daily chores and establishing curfew assume added significance only after Margot fails to come home one night. Everything significant happens while the Apple “flurry” screensaver floats jellyfish-like across a dark computer screen: David misses two calls and an invitation to FaceTime from Margot, and when he wakes up the next morning, it takes him a while to realize something’s wrong.

And then he starts to freak out, blowing up her phone with nagging-dad texts (the same messages come flooding back, simultaneously amusing and ominous, when he logs on to her computer). David calls his pothead brother Peter (Joseph Lee) for advice, then begins to do precisely what no teenager wants: He reaches out to each of Margot’s “friends,” demanding to know when they last saw her. His daughter would be mortified — if she’s not already dead, that is.

Detective Rosemary Vick (Debra Messing) is optimistic. She specializes in missing-children cases, and volunteers to help, doubling as a sounding board for David’s many wild theories on what could have happened. At first, Chaganty finds it relatively easy to track the progress of David’s investigation on-screen. His actions are logical, as he moves from one social-media platform to another — Instagram, Facebook, a Twitch-like self-streaming site called YouCast — but he’s also a dad, and some of these sites are new to him. “What’s a tumbler?” he asks at one point.

Stumped by a password he can’t guess, David uses a sneaky trick to hack Margot’s account, only to discover that his daughter isn’t nearly as popular as he imagined. In fact, since her mom’s death, Margot may have been leading a double life, stealing money, and communicating with strangers online. Suddenly, the mystery is bigger than who may have kidnapped Margot. David desperately wants to know what’s been going on in her head. (Maybe he should check her Kindle to see if she’s been reading “Gone Girl.”)

Though he occasionally jumps from one computer to another, Chaganty sticks to the computer-screen rule, although a weird thing happens two-thirds of the way into the movie: At a certain point, it’s no longer clear who is actually operating the machine, as the suddenly-omniscient storyteller watches the juiciest part of the story unfold on YouTube and various local news sites: David drives out to Barbosa Lake (cue GPS app), confronts a disrespectful classmate (the skirmish is caught on a bystander’s iPhone and uploaded to YouTube), and installs hidden cameras in another suspect’s apartment (we see the feed he intends to use as evidence).

By this point in the case, it’s not clear why we’re still stuck in the computer. After all, “Searching” has talented actors in Cho and Messing. Wouldn’t a traditional format have been more effective than squinting at them in various low-res online clips? (As possible models, both “District 9” and “End of Watch” began as found-footage movies, but expanded to include non-diegetic cameras when their stories heated up.) One possible solution: By sticking to his conceit, Chaganty can comment on a fascinating new phenomenon — namely, how the “court of public opinion” swiftly leaps to its own conclusions.

On Twitter, the case goes viral, and the #FindMargot hashtag brings out the hypocrisy in everyone: Classmates who hardly knew her claim to have been Margot’s best friend, soaking up the sympathy intended for her, while haters rush to assume #DadDidIt. But until her body reappears, dead or alive, the mystery remains compellingly difficult to crack, with new revelations forcing both David and the audience to reconsider everything right up until the final reveal.

At Sundance, the film was projected for an audience, whose collective gasps and laughter fuel the experience, but of course, many will watch “Searching” alone on their personal computer screens — which Chaganty must have had in mind, when designing how to frame the action. He seldom shows David’s full screen, but instead, crops and cuts in such a way as to emphasize where we should be looking (which isn’t always where the cursor is pointing). Editors Will Merrick and Nick Johnson deserve special credit for assembling a complex 3D puzzle that seems to be happening in real time, creating both urgency and the illusion that we have an active role in solving it, while actually forcing us down a predetermined path, full of red herrings and uncanny suspense sequences.

None of this would matter if we didn’t care about the characters, and in “Searching,” Chaganty has found a new idiom for communicating not only the things we share, but also those we keep hidden from the ones we love.

Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival (NEXT), Jan. 22, 2018. Running time: 101 MIN.

• Production: A Sony release of a Bazelevs Prods. presentation. Producers: Timur Bekmambetov, Sev Ohanian, Adam Sidman, Natalie Qasabian. Executive producers: Ana Liza Muravina, Mariya Zatulovskaya, Igor Tsay.
• Crew: Director: Aneesh Chaganty. Screenplay: Chaganty, Sev Ohanian. Camera (color, HD): Juan Sebastian Baron. Editors: Will Merrick, Nick Johnson. Music: Torin Borrowdale.
• With: John Cho, Debra Messing, Joseph Lee, Joseph Lee, Michelle La, Sara Sohn.

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Searching Review

31 Aug 2018

It’s easy to get fixated on the gimmick of Searching . Its entire story is told on a computer screen. Via FaceTime chats, YouTube clips, Google searches and, that most thrilling of visual media, Excel spreadsheets, we watch the unfolding drama of the disappearance of a teenage girl, Margot (La), and her dad David’s ( Cho ) desperate mission to find out what happened to her. It’s more than just a gimmick, though. It’s a highly entertaining, fast-moving and gripping drama with a solid emotional core.

The gimmick is used very well by first-time director Aneesh Chaganty. In the opening ten minutes, he sets out his conceit by giving us Margot’s entire childhood on a computer screen. We see saved photos of her first day in each school grade, her parents beaming behind her; video clips of piano lessons with her mum and playing with dad; then her mum’s Google search for fighting lymphoma; emails about remission then relapse; a calendar with the note “mom comes home!” moved later and later, until it’s deleted. It’s a bit like a less cute version of the opening of Up . Within just a few minutes Chaganty has fully established Margot’s dynamic with her father and the loss both feel without Margot’s mother. Then he upends everything with Margot’s disappearance and her dad’s realisation that she had a whole life that he knew nothing about.

The film can be shown entirely on a computer because that’s where David spends most of his life.

Primarily, Searching is a thriller, and a very effective one. It keeps the clues and twists coming thick and fast as David both helps and hinders the detective ( Debra Messing ) leading the hunt for Margot. Despite the static nature of the computer screen, Chaganty gives it energy with handheld FaceTime chats as David runs through dark woods, or urgently cut news footage on a YouTube clip, or the camera’s eye sweeping around the screen picking up details. It’s always in motion. Great credit to Cho for commanding the screen when he spends most of his time sitting down and looking just slightly to the right of the camera. Very occasionally, Chaganty pushes the conceit too far, putting in “breaking news” footage that has way too much detail to be believable, because it’s the only way to get in certain information he needs to continue the story. It doesn’t derail it, though. The approach gives it some licence to be pulpy. The heightened presentation allows for heightened storytelling.

There’s some neat character exploration going on too. The film can be shown entirely on a computer because that’s where David spends most of his life. His human interactions are almost entirely via webcam. He’ll open up tab after tab of news stories he never reads. Even when he’s asleep, his computer is awake and ready. Subtly, Chaganty conveys a man who isn’t coping with his wife’s death, who both needs constant distraction and interaction, but can’t bring himself to be physically around people. He’s a man who can never go offline. Searching will make you wonder whether you should ever share anything online again.

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Review: John Cho endures every father’s worst nightmare in the innovative mystery-thriller ‘Searching’

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The eeriest scene in the gripping techno-whodunit “Searching” consists of little more than a computer screensaver, glowing silently in the dark like a jellyfish. A series of incoming call notifications pop up on the screen, but the computer’s owner, David Kim (John Cho), is asleep and thus unaware that his teenage daughter, Margot (Michelle La), is desperately trying to reach him.

The moment takes on layers of Hitchcockian dread and a paralyzing sense of helplessness: Thanks to bad luck and human error, not even the devices that connect us 24/7 can tell us everything we want to know.

The dubious paradoxes of Internet technology — its power to inform and deceive, to connect and alienate — are at the heart of this ingeniously high-concept thriller from the 27-year-old writer-director Aneesh Chaganty. 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.

This isn’t the first movie to turn FaceTime chats and browser windows into the stuff of a taut, intriguing, sometimes uncomfortably voyeuristic drama. Earlier versions of this conceit played out in the under-seen 2014 Elijah Wood shocker “Open Windows” and the recent “Unfriended” horror movies, all of which were about unsuspecting computer owners being terrorized by off-screen psychopaths. The novelty was that each of those thrillers played out in real time, in what appeared to be a single take, so that you as a viewer felt unsettlingly hard-wired into the user experience.

With ‘Searching,’ ‘Unfriended’ and beyond, Timur Bekmambetov seeks a new cinematic language that mirrors our digital lives »

Although “Searching” is no less accomplished in its formal syntax — at any moment you may find yourself marveling at the low-key accuracy of the production design, or the ease with which a moving cursor can hold your attention — it doesn’t play out in real time. The mystery here, in which a father tries to find his missing daughter by digging into her online history, plays out in a less sadistic, more intimate register, and it benefits from having someone as recognizable and appealing as Cho in the driver’s seat. Because his story unfolds over the course of a week, Chaganty relies on familiar narrative techniques such as exposition and montage, and he and his ace technical collaborators maintain visual interest by continually reframing David’s screen with strategic cuts and zooms.

The prologue alone compresses more than a decade of family life into a laughter-and-tears montage, composed from photos and videos stored on the Kims’ desktop computer. We watch as David and his wife, Pamela (Sara Sohn), happily raise Margot (played by a few actresses of different ages), their lives a flurry of piano lessons and morning jogs. There are ups and downs, highs and lows, none lower than Pamela’s long, difficult battle with cancer. The whole sequence may remind you of the deeply moving marriage-in-miniature sequence from Pixar’s “Up,” but this time with a distracting whiff of e-product placement.

The story proper picks up sometime after Pamela’s death. David has sadly moved on with Margot, who is by all appearances a smart, well-adjusted 16-year-old, at least from our brief glimpse of her in an early FaceTime chat with Dad. The actors have a lovely, unforced rapport that toggles gently between affection and exasperation: When David sends Margot a text message one afternoon, playfully chiding her for having forgotten to take out the trash, he makes sure to include a photo of the overflowing can. Margot, distracted with schoolwork, promises she’ll take care of it when she gets home.

Except that she never makes it home (cue those frantic middle-of-the-night phone calls), and David soon finds himself plunged into every parent’s worst nightmare — albeit one that unspools more slowly and realistically, at first, than the average missing-persons melodrama. Filtering their story through Google searches, video chats and other online applications forces Chaganty and his co-writer, Sev Ohanian, to apply a step-by-step procedural rigor, ensuring that the audience doesn’t miss any crucial details. The movie is so insistent on plausibility that it takes several hours (and several fruitless phone calls) before David even realizes that Margot might be in serious danger.

At the recommendation of Det. Rosemary Vick (Debra Messing), who’s leading the police investigation, David begins searching Margot’s laptop for clues to her disappearance, with some help from his more laid-back younger brother, Peter (Joseph Lee). Dad’s sleuthing generates some sly comedy (the way Cho inflects the word “Venmo” is a highlight), but he turns out to be as tech-savvy and resourceful as he needs to be as he pores over Margot’s email and social-media accounts (a string of password resets is one of many puzzles that need solving), calls up her Facebook contacts and tries to piece together her last known whereabouts.

The heart of the investigation, and the movie, is a trove of old live-cast videos that Margot had recorded and saved. Watching them for the first time, David begins to appreciate how much he didn’t know (or care to ask) about his daughter, namely how profoundly lonely she had become following her mother’s death. In these moments, “Searching” poignantly explores both the comfort and the isolation that technology can breed, even as it considers the lasting effects of grief. It also satirizes the ways in which that grief can be mocked and exploited, through mindless online gossip, sensationalist media coverage and the performative sympathy of onlookers who claim to have known Margot better than they did.

“Searching” is nothing if not ambitious, and its rapidly accelerating second half is jammed with bold twists, red herrings and breathless confrontations. It’s also here that the movie begins to slacken its grip — partly because some of the twists beggar belief, and partly because they strain the limits of the online-all-the-time interface. 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.

The movie is at its strongest when that perspective is David’s, and Cho, following his superb lead turn in last year’s very different “Columbus,” gets the kind of full-bodied actor’s showcase that has eluded him too long. 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.

------------

‘Searching’

Rating: PG-13, for thematic content, some drug and sexual references, and for language

Running time: 1 hour, 42 minutes

Playing: ArcLight Cinemas, Hollywood; AMC Century City 15, Century City; ArcLight Cinemas, Sherman Oaks

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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'searching' review: john cho anchors a gloriously good thriller.

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'Searching'

The Box Office:

Opening in nine theaters tonight before going wide next weekend, Screen Gems’  Searching  is the second high-profile major studio release that just happens to be headlined by an Asian actor. While  Crazy Rich Asians  essentially had to have a mostly-Asian cast,  Searching  is an old-school thriller (with new-school technology) that just happens to star John Cho. As such, it is just as important to advancing the notion of inclusivity as the recent Jon M. Chu-directed hit. As such, it’s encouraging to see the folks being  Crazy Rich Asians  using their social media accounts to promote this one too.

So the big question, with the caveat that this is a pretty low-budget thriller, is whether all of the folks that got excited about that #starringJohnCho hashtag that went viral two years ago (which imagined Cho as the lead in the kinds of major studio flicks that almost always star white dudes) will actually show up for this multiplex-friendly flick that just happens to star one of the more well-known Asian-American actors. That it’s a great movie only helps the cause, although I again maintain that you can’t just show up for the masterpieces.

Screen Gems is hoping for a boffo per-theater average this weekend followed by a solid Labor Day opening weekend as summer ends. As always, it’s a question of whether folks who claim to want this sort of thing will show up and buy a ticket, or whether they were just performing for Facebook shares and Twitter retweets. All the “Yay, progress!” blog posts in the world won’t mean a damn thing if you don’t pay to see the movie in a theater. Here’s hoping that you do.

The Review:

Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching is a superb thriller. It uses its unique format (as a “desktop horror” flick) to tell a full-bodied movie that works both as a newfangled tech exercise and a joltingly moving character play. I don’t know at what point I’ll stop being impressed at how these sorts of films use the bells and whistles of the Internet to tell old stories in a new fashion, but this is easily the best of the bunch thus far.

The picture, penned by Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian, opens with an extended montage of a life partially lived online. It introduces us to our core characters and, through YouTube videos, social media posts and a Google calendar, establishes at least a few of the core conflicts in a way as hauntingly beautiful as that (in)famous opening to Pixar’s Up . It certainly sets the movie up on the right foot, and if you’re not invested by the end of the prologue I’m not sure I want to know you.

Anyway, the core plot involves David Kim (John Cho) realizing that his teenage daughter (Michelle La) is missing and embarking on a digital quest to figure out where she might have gone. And, yes, the entire film is conducted via computer screens and smartphones, as well as periodically TV news clips shown on a computer screen. We’ve seen this kind of gimmick played out via the likes of (the surprisingly gripping) Unfriended , and it works even better here.

That film used its tech gimmick to create a sense of doom and a ticking clock via its supernatural menace. Searching uses its web-centric filmmaking to show how a world of constant communication and connectivity has allowed us to be less connected to each other and less aware of who our friends and family really are. That’s not a new concept, but its emphasis on the value of open communication (in this case, between a father and daughter crippled by grief) makes this feel like an early M. Night Shyamalan picture.

I have no desire to reveal the various (entirely fair) twists, turns and revelations, but our focal points quickly became John Cho’s terrified father and the cop assigned to the case, played with buttoned-down resolve by Debra Messing. There are plentiful moments of earned tension and more than a few grim laughs along the way. And, slight spoiler I suppose, but I appreciated that the film didn’t go down the expected path of this kind of “What happened to my daughter?” story.

And through it all is Cho, anchoring the film and appearing in almost every frame in an all-too-rare lead role. His fear and despair are more-than-relatable as a father trying to figure out who his daughter has become over the previous two years. I don’t want to make this whole review about the systematic injustice that sees the Harold and Kumar / Selfie star getting his first major studio leading role at the age of 46 and 19 years after American Pie , but he certainly makes the most of the opportunity.

Searching is a wonderful piece of major studio popcorn entertainment. Whether you want to argue that its against-the-grain casting and its specific format are beside the point or entirely the point, it’s a damn great thriller and one of the best studio releases of the year. Even with a few third-act nitpicks (nothing deal-breaking), it rises above and specifically utilizes its format limitations to craft a truly unique and achingly poignant drama that also comes filled with bruised-forearm thrills. And its emphasis on empathy (for good and for ill) and communication makes it an incredibly powerful melodrama.

If movies like Searching and A Quiet Place are what we’re going to get from the generation of young filmmakers who grew up in the shadow of M. Night Shyamalan’s early triumphs, filmmakers who realized that the infamous twists were less important than the “feels,” then I imagine we’re in for a lot of top-flight genre films and the overall legacy of the man who made The Sixth Sense , Unbreakable and Signs is set no matter what comes of his current Blumhouse comeback. I can’t wait…

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New a24 horror movie becomes studio's lowest-rated 2024 film on rotten tomatoes, stephen king shares review for mike flanagan's third king adaptation ahead of premiere: "not what you'd expect from me", searching is a suspenseful drama, buoyed by its innovative filmmaking style and collection of strong performances by its leads..

Premiering at Sundance earlier this year, the new thriller  Searching is now playing in theaters nationwide. Marking the debut of director Aneesh Chagnaty (who also wrote the script), the film is noteworthy for the way in which it tells its story.  Searching is set almost entirely on electronic screens, illustrating how technology is an integral part of our lives - for better or worse. That could run the risk of becoming a simple gimmick to make its tried-and-true premise more "modern" for today's audiences, but the end result is something far more than a simple experiment.  Searching is a suspenseful drama, buoyed by its innovative filmmaking style and collection of strong performances by its leads.

David Kim (John Cho) and his wife Pam (Sara Sohn) are two loving parents to their daughter Margot (Michelle La). Over the course of Margot's childhood, the family chronicles their adventures on their computer, with photos and videos commemorating Margot's first days of school, her piano lessons, and other special occasions. However, right before Margot begins high school, the Kims are rocked by a tragedy and struggle to adjust to their new lives in the aftermath.

On a night when Margot stays late at a friend's house for a study group, David falls asleep before she gets back home. The following day, David becomes troubled when Margot doesn't respond to any of his messages. Filing a missing persons report, David joins forces with Detective Vick (Debra Messing), and the two work together to uncover any clues they possibly can - including whatever's stored in Margot's laptop - in an effort to find Margot, before something terrible happens.

As indicated above,  Searching is told via computer and smartphone screens, a device that helps elevate the final product. The decision to have the mystery unfold through the devices that consume our everyday existence helps complement the movie's themes about personal connections and the dangers (and benefits) of technology. Chagnaty never feels limited by working on this canvas, keeping the proceedings visually engaging throughout  Searching' s taut runtime and making something mundane like a web search feel very dramatic. There are some neat tricks on display (see: the "sleep screen" transitions to indicate it's a new day), and the technology component helps  Searching feel fresh and unique, despite the on-paper setup (teenage daughter disappears) being familiar.

Searching  isn't just an exercise for a showy new style. It helps greatly that Cho gives one of his finest performances as David. One does not need to be a parent to empathize with his character, with the actor brilliantly portraying the desperation of the situation. What makes Cho's turn stand out even more is that he has an opportunity to explore various sides of David, taking part in some actions that are morally questionable (but justifiable from his point of view), forcing the audience to contemplate what they would do if they were going through the same thing. Cho has to do much of the heavy lifting and carries  Searching on his shoulders, proving he's a more-than-capable leading man.

With much of the focus on David's predicament and search for Margot, the supporting cast has less to do by comparison, but are still solid in their parts. Messing is a strong authoritarian presence as Vick, serving as a nice foil for the increasingly concerned and despondent David. The two stars play off each other nicely, despite most of their interactions taking place through FaceTime video chats. Joseph Lee is also good as Peter, David's stoner brother, who has more layers than one might initially think. As for La's Margot, she is a little more than just a human MacGuffin, as there are important moments of character shading that clue the audience into the kind of person Margot is. Admittedly, La doesn't have the biggest role, but she makes for a convincing teenager in her brief scenes.

Even if  Searching didn't make effective use of its technology angle, the core story would still work due to Chagnaty's script, which packs an emotional punch from its first moments and never holds back. It's hard to not get caught up in the mystery, and viewers should have fun trying to piece together all the evidence as it comes in. Chagnaty does a solid job keeping viewers on their toes, weaving in several possible leads relatively seamlessly so  Searching never feels predictable. In some respects, it actually subverts certain tropes with its twists, making it all the more satisfying an experience.

In the end,  Searching is a most pleasant surprise at the tail end of summer, serving up a gripping narrative and an outside-the-box concept that works in spades. Chagnaty announces himself as a director to watch, and it'll be interesting to see where his filmmaking career goes from here. For those looking for a reprieve from the bigger studio tentpoles of the past few months or something creative to bide the time until the Oscar hopefuls start popping up in theaters,  Searching is definitely one to check out on the big screen.

Searching is now playing in U.S. theaters. It runs 102 minutes and is rated PG-13 for thematic content, some drug and sexual references, and for language.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments!

Searching is a drama thriller that stars John Cho as David Kim whose 16-year-old daughter goes missing. Despite a local investigation being opened with an active detective assigned to the case, thirty-seven hours pass without a single lead. Desperate and frustrated, David decides to search the one place no one has looked yet, where all secrets are kept today: his daughter's laptop. Utilizing technology to conduct his own investigation, David must trace his daughter's digital footprints before she disappears forever.

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Common Sense Media Review

Digital mystery satisfies on technical, emotional levels.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Searching is a mystery starring John Cho about a missing teen that's presented entirely through/on computer screens (similar to the horror movie Unfriended ). It's cleverly constructed and emotionally satisfying, as well as diverse and culturally relevant. Expect brief on…

Why Age 13+?

A main character dies of cancer. A teen girl goes missing. A car is found in a l

A spoken and written use of "f---ing," plus uses of "s--t," "ass," "damn," "hell

Several tech brand names are mentioned and shown throughout: Internet Explorer,

A secondary character seems to be something of a drug dealer. A jar full of pot

Brief sex-related dialogue, sex-related material. Brief, wrongful assumption tha

Any Positive Content?

Movie is all about solving problems, as well as persistence/perseverance in the

David Kim is a sympathetic character, a problem solver, a good parent who goes t

Violence & Scariness

A main character dies of cancer. A teen girl goes missing. A car is found in a lake (there's the possibility of a body inside). A man punches a teen boy. Bloody/bruised face. Spoken reference to a jaw being broken. Two men fight/brawl. A man appears to shoot himself on a video. Spoken references to beating, etc. Arguing and yelling. Threats.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

A spoken and written use of "f---ing," plus uses of "s--t," "ass," "damn," "hella," "perv," and "oh my God" as an exclamation.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Several tech brand names are mentioned and shown throughout: Internet Explorer, YouTube, eBay, Google, Facebook, Mircosoft, Apple iPhone, Uber, FaceTime, Gmail, Yahoo, Venmo, Norton Antivirus, etc. An Apple computer is turned on, with the familiar "gong" sound and logo. Pokémon is shown and mentioned.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

A secondary character seems to be something of a drug dealer. A jar full of pot is shown. Teen drug use is inferred. Photo of teen drug use. Pipe smoking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Brief sex-related dialogue, sex-related material. Brief, wrongful assumption that an uncle is having a sexual relationship with his teen niece.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Movie is all about solving problems, as well as persistence/perseverance in the face of great stress and very little hope. Generosity is a virtue, and better communication between family members is encouraged. Simple "protection" of family members, no matter what they've done wrong, is discouraged.

Positive Role Models

David Kim is a sympathetic character, a problem solver, a good parent who goes to great lengths to rescue his daughter. He's also a positive, three-dimensional Asian American character. Without giving too much away, Margot performs an act of incredible generosity; it doesn't turn out well for her, but her act is nonetheless seen as admirable.

Parents need to know that Searching is a mystery starring John Cho about a missing teen that's presented entirely through/on computer screens (similar to the horror movie Unfriended ). It's cleverly constructed and emotionally satisfying, as well as diverse and culturally relevant. Expect brief on-screen fighting, arguing, and yelling, as well as offscreen and verbal references to violence. A main character dies of cancer. There's a bit of sex-related dialogue and some sexual references, and there's a brief, wrongful theory that an uncle is having some kind of sexual relationship with his teen niece. Language includes one "f---ing" and uses of "perv." A secondary character appears to be a drug dealer, supplying pot (offscreen) to a teen girl. A jar filled with pot is shown, teen drug use is inferred, and there's pipe smoking. Many tech brand names are shown throughout (Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc.), but all in service to the story. Underlying everything are messages of perseverance and the need for stronger communication among family members, as well as the notion of the internet as both a useful and a dangerous place. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (11)
• Kids say (27)

Based on 11 parent reviews

Must Watch!

What's the story.

In SEARCHING, David Kim ( John Cho ) has a happy family. He enjoys watching his daughter Margot grow up, posting pictures and videos of her to social media. As Margot hits her teenage years (played by Michelle La ), David finds himself raising her alone, and she seems increasingly distant. Finally one day she simply disappears after a supposed study group, and David hits the internet to try to find clues about where she might have gone. Her friends don't seem to know much, but he discovers that she's also been skipping her piano lessons and pocketing the money. A detective ( Debra Messing ) comes on the case, and time seems to be running out. Can David spot the final clue that will piece everything together?

Is It Any Good?

Perhaps inspired by the success of 2014's Unfriended , this mystery ventures in fresh, new directions while being superbly constructed, emotionally satisfying, and culturally relevant. The debut feature of director Aneesh Chaganty , who also wrote the screenplay with producer Sev Ohanian, Searching is notable for focusing on a Korean American family without making an issue of it. It frankly doesn't matter what culture the Kim family comes from (other than in the valuable representation sense, of course). What matters is what would matter to any human being when a family member is in trouble.

In the lead role, Cho does amazing things, performing largely by himself and within unconventional cameras and camera setups, reaching new emotional depths. The movie's filming techniques do recall some of the more effective things used in Unfriended and Unfriended: Dark Web , but Searching expands the genre's toolbox, going further in both time and space. And the screenplay, while suffering a few small, easily forgivable shaky spots, is a thing of beauty, furthering the story with desperate, constant propulsion, and dropping little clues in the most innocuous places. When it all comes together, it's with a most pleasurable snap.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Searching 's depiction of violence . How much is shown, and how much is kept offscreen? Are these incidents equally effective? Why or why not?

How are drugs depicted? Are they glamorized in any way? Are there consequences to teens using drugs? Why does that matter?

The movie shows the internet to be both useful and dangerous. How can we choose what's safe -- and what isn't ?

Margot's act of generosity turns out badly, but how does the movie view her act? Is she still admirable? Should generosity be viewed as risky?

How do the characters demonstrate perseverance ? Why is that an important character strength ?

Movie Details

• In theaters : August 24, 2018
• On DVD or streaming : November 27, 2018
• Cast : John Cho , Debra Messing , Michelle La
• Director : Aneesh Chaganty
• Inclusion Information : Asian actors
• Studio : Screen Gems
• Genre : Thriller
• Character Strengths : Perseverance
• Run time : 102 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : thematic content, some drug and sexual references, and for language
• Last updated : July 30, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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• Sony Pictures Entertainment

Summary After David Kim (John Cho)’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. In a hyper-modern thriller told via th ... Read More

Directed By : Aneesh Chaganty

Written By : Aneesh Chaganty, Sev Ohanian

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Debra Messing

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John Cho movie Searching stares at screens in search of secrets

Review: Looking for a smart, suspenseful movie dealing with the internet in a clever, funny way? Your search is over.

A child grows up in front of our eyes in smartphone photos, video chats and calendar reminders for the first day of school. This is how the new movie Searching  begins, revealing a life through the digital ephemera of the information age. 

This opening introduces us to both the characters and the conceit of the film: It plays out entirely through the lens of laptop and phone screens. Everything we see, we see through a screen. We watch the cursor roam across a Mac desktop. We see the characters stare back at us as they chat in FaceTime. And plot twists are revealed by visits to  Google , Instagram and Reddit.

Searching was co-written and directed by Aneesh Chaganty , who quit his job making adverts for Google to make the film. Originally entitled Search, it was rapturously received at the Sundance Film Festival , voted by audiences as the winner of the festival's Next category of innovative filmmaking. And in a quiet year for Sundance acquisitions, it was snapped up by Sony  immediately. In theatres from 24 August, the film arrives just behind Crazy Rich Asians and Netflix's To All The Boys I've Loved Before , making this a good summer for diverse filmmakers.

Star Trek star John Cho plays the concerned parent who discovers his daughter is missing, and begins hunting for clues across her social media accounts. The more he pieces together about her life, the more he realises he doesn't know his child at all.

This isn't the first film to play out through the lens of a computer screen, following the effective one-screen horror movie Unfriended . But Searching mines the concept in all manner of ways, wringing layers of tension, humour and pathos from the various apps and software appearing onscreen. Think of it as Hitchcockian conceit -- complete with Hitchcock levels of suspense.

2018 sci-fi, fantasy and geek movies to get excited about

If that sounds like a gimmick, the opening moments put any concern to rest. Searching opens with a sequence spelling out the life of a family that's up there with the first 15 minutes of Pixar's Up in terms of emotion. The kid at the centre of the story, Margot, grows up in photos and videos, and there won't be a dry eye in the house. Then she disappears, leaving only a lingering ghostly online presence offering tantalising hints that conjure a spiralling sense of mystery and tension.

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The film does stretch the on-screen concept a  bit  thin when characters venture away from  laptops , forcing us to lean too heavily on unconvincing YouTube news reports for great chunks of exposition. But that's more than balanced by the way the ever-present blinking cursor of the search box and blank space of the message app almost become characters in their own right, patiently waiting for the characters to express emotions. 

We get to read between the lines of messages typed and never sent, opening a gateway into characters' true feelings and contrasting them with the faces they present in public and online.

Chaganty and co-writer Sev Ohanian do a great job mining the premise, not just showing the search unfolding through screens but also examining some of the issues of the internet age, such as cyberbullying, online grooming and social media witch hunts. 

As well as being edge-of-the-seat tense and enormously funny, Searching offers an interesting subtext too. Set in San Jose, California, it's about a child literally missing in Silicon Valley, as well as also being metaphorically lost amid the social media products created there. It's a potent symbol of different generations connected and at the same time separated by the technology they use.

Searching is in theaters this weekend. It's worth the screen time.

For more about the film, check out our discussion with  the star, director and co-writers John Cho, Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian .

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Directed by Aneesh Chaganty

No one is lost without a trace.

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.

John Cho Michelle La Debra Messing Joseph Lee Sara Sohn Briana McLean Erica Jenkins Connor McRaith Dominic Hoffman Ric Sarabia Steven Michael Eich Melissa Disney Sean O'Bryan Ben Cain Alex Jayne Go Megan Liu Kya Dawn Lau Colin Woodell Ashley Edner Courtney Lauren Cummings Kenneth Mosley Miss Benny Franchesca Maia Thomas Barbusca Sylvia Minassian Bryce Branagan Katie Rowe Kristin Herold Roy Abramsohn Show All… Reed Buck Brad Abrell Rasha Goel Johnno Wilson Erin Henriques Gage Biltoft Lasaundra Gibson John Macey Betsy Foldes Joseph John Schirle Julie Nathanson Michelle Sparks Gabriel D. Angell Harvey B. Jackson Anthony Richard Pagliaro Rene Michelle Aranda

Director Director

Aneesh Chaganty

Producers Producers

Natalie Qasabian Adam Sidman Timur Bekmambetov Sev Ohanian Congyu E

Writers Writers

Aneesh Chaganty Sev Ohanian

Casting Casting

Lindsey Weissmueller Mayank Bhatter

Editors Editors

Nicholas D. Johnson Will Merrick

Cinematography Cinematography

Juan Sebastian Baron

Assistant Director Asst. Director

Carly Sturgeon

Executive Producers Exec. Producers

Ana Liza Muravina Igor Tsay Mariya Zatulovskaya

Production Design Production Design

Angel Herrera

Art Direction Art Direction

Carol Uraneck

Set Decoration Set Decoration

John Acosta Anthony Ruff Bobby Guard

Visual Effects Visual Effects

Justin Giritlian Nathan Sam Weiner Alexandr Gorokhov Ekaterina Averina Alexey Uskov

Stunts Stunts

Erik Stabenau John Branagan Carl Ciarfalio Tim Garris Clint Lilley Cassie Lee Minick

Composer Composer

Torin Borrowdale

Sound Sound

Eric I. Bucklin Takako Ishikawa Pinhua Chen Michael Krystek Gerry Montejo Jesse Smith Nathan Ruyle Mark Lanza Mike Miller Nick Offord Steven Ticknor

Costume Design Costume Design

Emily Moran

Makeup Makeup

Hairstyling hairstyling.

Vyvy Tran Gina Banic

Stage 6 Films Screen Gems Bazelevs Production

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18 jan 2018, 24 aug 2018, 29 aug 2018, 31 aug 2018, 06 sep 2018, 12 sep 2018, 13 sep 2018, 14 sep 2018, 20 sep 2018, 27 sep 2018, 28 sep 2018, 17 oct 2018, 18 oct 2018, 26 oct 2018, 02 nov 2018, 30 nov 2018, 29 jul 2018, 10 aug 2018, 24 dec 2018, 23 jan 2019, 05 feb 2019, 21 sep 2021, 30 dec 2043, 30 jan 2019, 04 mar 2019, releases by country.

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Netherlands

• Physical 12 DVD, Blu ray
• Theatrical M/12
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South Korea

Switzerland.

• Digital 12A
• Physical 12A
• Premiere PG-13 Sundance Film Festival
• Theatrical PG-13

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Popular reviews

Review by anoopmama ★★★★★ 49

As soon as the film started, I began to openly and unabashedly cry tears of immense joy and pride.

I've seen this movie before, so lemme be the first tell you it's good. Actually nah, it's fucking amazing.

To outside eyes, getting into Sundance may just be the coolest thing thing that could ever happen to someone. Naturally, there's a lot of buzz about how this first-time director could pull off such a feat.

To be completely honest, I'm not surprised at all.

I don't think I'll ever be surprised at my brother's success for that matter. For almost three decades, the dude has been entirely unwavering in his passion for cinema, and while I hated being his cameraman during…

Review by Vivian ★★★★ 19

imagine he went to her tumblr and it was like superwholock and like shipping thorki

Review by Ellie ✨ ★★★★½

wild how the most relatable character in movie history is that one person on reddit who thought margot gone girled herself

Review by cinéfila... 🕯️ ★★★★ 8

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

proof that u should never trust a cop to solve your daughter's disappearance unless its jake gyllenhaal in prisoners

Review by Karsten ★★★★ 3

this was really great. honestly could have been a masterpiece if some of it was a bit more believable. but man, I know this has been said thousands of times by now but I cannot IMAGINE the headache this was to edit. 

Also, convinced john cho is excellent in everything he is in, cannot wait for more of him.

Review by veronica ★★★★ 6

david moving “margot_fathersday.mp4” to trash and then emptying the trash was the saddest shit ever

Review by kayla ★★★★ 11

I honestly learned some new Mac tricks so thanks for that

Review by molly ❤️‍🔥 ★★★★★

bieber concert (confirmed)

Review by Ian ★★★★ 2

WHERE WERE YOU THE NIGHT SHE WENT MISSING???!!!

..... Bieber concert ..... (confirmed)

Jeez. This movie is amazing. So much better than what the Unfriended films could ever be.

Review by minick ★★★

if someone tried to facetime me i would call the cops too

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my children will never be allowed to leave the house

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this is such a fuckin good episode of CSI: Cyber I didn’t even mind that they cut out ted danson

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‘Searching’ turns a computer screen into compelling cinema

We're watching a new filmmaking technique evolve..

The idea of watching a movie told entirely through computer screens sounds like a gimmick. Unfriended gave us a taste of that. It was a horror movie told through Skype video chats in what producer Timur Bekmambetov calls Screenlife , his movement to tell more stories through screens. Unfriended was a hit, but it was also a first stab at a new style of storytelling. Searching , on the other hand, the new thriller starring John Cho and directed by Aneesh Chaganty, deftly shows how Screenlife films can be genuinely cinematic.

The movie follows David Kim (Cho), a single father who discovers that his daughter Margot is missing. He ends up embarking on a digital odyssey through her computer, phone and social media history. Searching has all the twists and turns you'd expect from a mystery thriller — complete with surprise discoveries about Margot's personal life and a slew of dramatic red herrings. But it's also refreshing, since it's told through the lens of the devices we use every day. The majority of the film takes place on David's Mac, and we see him in a window when he's video chatting.

Searching opens with the bright blue and green of the Windows XP login screen. We watch as Pamela, David's wife, creates a user account, sets up her email and collects family photos. These are all mundane tasks, but, together with a bombastic score, they tell the story of Pamela's life over time. It's hard not to think back to when we were all using Windows XP, 10 to 15 years ago, a time when broadband was starting to become ubiquitous. Just imagine the stories that our old computers could tell.

"I was a filmmaker at the Google Creative Lab, and basically I got to write and develop and direct commercials for them," Chaganty said in an interview with Engadget. "Basically our job was to look at Google as a whole, and you know, kind of frame a lot of the technology that was coming out... in a way that us normal people could understand, that was emotional and through some sort of narrative usually. A lot of the commercials that I made incorporated screens and technology, and my bosses there literally taught me how to emote on a computer screen."

He points to Persian Love and Dear Sophie , two early Google commercials that take place entirely through the search bar and Gmail. With a combination of a dramatic score and skillful editing, they both show us how you can tell an emotional story through screens. Chaganty noticed that those short commercials often made people cry by the end, and watching them felt like "realizing that you knew a language you never knew you knew."

At first, Chaganty had a hard time seeing how screen captures could be turned into a 90-minute feature film. But he and Sev Ohanian, the film's co-writer, managed to convince each other as they worked on Searching. "I knew that, despite the fact that you don't see someone's face, a blinking cursor can still make you feel," Chaganty said.

For John Cho, Searching wasn't a sure bet at first -- especially after watching Unfriended , a film that worked but "didn't feel particularly cinematic," he told Engadget. Mostly, he was worried about the difficulty of acting in front of a single static camera, instead of the multiple angles of a traditional film. Chaganty convinced him that it would still feel classical by relying on things like camera panning and zooming.

Whereas in Unfriended it sometimes felt like we were watching a recording of a computer screen, Searching cuts across multiple devices and a variety of perspectives. The camera is always on the move -- we see up-close iMessage chats and Facebook feeds, almost as if we're laser-focused on what David is looking at. The camerawork makes something dull like a Google Sheet seem compelling as he feverishly works through a list of potential suspects. Even wide shots of his computer desktop tell a story. You can feel the pressure building as the screen starts filling up with a confusing web of files and folders.

To ensure that the film felt genuinely cinematic, Chaganty and Ohanian focused on the story first. Searching follows the familiar beats of a thriller, even though it's presented in an entirely new way. They were also quick to move beyond some of the rules that the Screenlife project had in mind, like keeping all of the action on one computer in real time. Searching moves throughout several screens and spans several weeks, so it never feels like you're just watching one person's desktop stream (something we're getting used to with services like Twitch).

Cho and co-star Debra Messing's FaceTime chats were recorded with small GoPro cameras, instead of coming straight from their phones and computers. For the actors, that was unusual, since it was a single camera pointed at them straight on. ("I'm not sure that I ever want to do a project again where I don't look at a person in the face, to be honest with you," Cho said.) But Ohanian noticed that the wide GoPro frame also let them capture small emotional beats in the actor's faces, something you'd lose with more traditional camera angles.

When it came to putting the film together, Chaganty and his editors, Nicholas Johnson and Will Merrick, faced an almost insurmountable ordeal."I'm not even exaggerating when I say thousands and thousands -- there were thousands and thousands of questions and conundrums and obstacles that they had to kind of solve," Chaganty said. It took them a year and a half with two constantly crashing iMacs to complete the film.

"I remember early cuts that I would watch, where I think our editors were a bit hesitant to do a lot of traditional editing," he said. But eventually they learned to trust the viewers. "You can train the audience to follow the action as if it was a regular movie. So we learned to let go of those fears and treat it like a real movie."

Bekmambetov claims there are 14 more Screenlife projects in the works, according to the L.A. Times . He's not wasting any time breaking new filmmaking ground. But, as Chaganty and Ohanian show, simply recording a screen isn't enough to make something feel truly cinematic. You still need a solid screenplay, an eye for imagery and the ability to edit your footage into something people would actually want to watch. We live our lives on screens more than ever, but our digital selves aren't the full story.

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Review by Brian Eggert September 2, 2018

Searching assumes a first-person perspective for a cleverly conceived thriller, seen entirely on computer screens and smartphones. A missing-persons investigation unfolds on video chat and social media, with the evidence squirreled away in private files and most frequently visited sites, as a father played by John Cho attempts to locate his daughter using modern technology. Along the way, director Aneesh Chaganty’s screenplay, co-written by Sev Ohanian, reveals a timely commentary about people using social media to mask their true selves. However full of potential, the execution of the concept proves inconsistent, while the twists and turns alternate between predictable red herrings and laughably corny dialogue. What works best about Searching are not the suspense elements, but rather, the psychological puzzle that has a surprising emotional impact and a worthwhile commentary about how technology can disconnect us from real human experiences.

The opening scenes set the emotional stage. A montage unfolds on a family computer, where we glimpse home video clips that tell us the story of David (John Cho), a proud father, and Pamela (Sara Sohn), a more intimately involved mother, as they raise their daughter Margot. We see Margot grow from an infant into a teenager, played by Michelle La, experiencing the family’s warmth and togetherness. But Pamela is diagnosed with a terminal case of lymphoma, and soon David is a widower. Now six months after their wife and mother’s passing, a gulf has developed between David and Margot. Their text and FaceTime exchanges reveal a teen keeping things from her father, and a parent unable to adequately communicate with his daughter. And then one night, after missing two calls and a video chat prompt from her the night before, David realizes that Margot is missing.

David files a missing person report, and Detective Rosemary Vick (Debra Messing) takes on the case. She asks David to search Margot’s social media profiles and talk to her friends to find evidence and paint a picture of where she was before she disappeared. He’s tech-savvy enough to figure out her passwords through some amateur online sleuthing, but he’s not exactly hip to what the kids are doing these days. (“What’s a tumbler?” he asks at one point.) Nevertheless, David learns that his daughter’s life was much more complicated than he knew. Her so-called friends on Facebook are not her friends at all, while her profiles on Instagram and a live-streaming service called YouCast reveal a teen who felt sad and alone. Along with evidence provided by Det. Vick in video chats, David uncovers proof that Margot may have run away or been kidnapped. Not-so-subtle hints point David to a mysterious user named “fish_n_chips” or even his pothead brother Peter (Joseph Lee).

Only occasionally involving, Searching aims for something like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), where the threats seem miles away and the protagonist is helpless to stop them. The formal presentation is similar to that of Unfriended (2015) and its sequel from this year, Unfriended: Dark Web , both produced by Timur Bekmambetov, who also produced Searching . The frame is filled with David’s cursor movements and typing. But Chaganty does more than simply show the entire screen of, say, David’s laptop or smartphone. The frame provides close-ups and moves about the various screens to direct our eyes to important information. Sometimes, a search bar might fill the entire frame, or the frame itself might move from looking at one part of David’s screen to another. However, the movements are not those of David’s eyes—they’re not natural movements; they’re cinematic, but in such a way that confuses the film’s perspective. If we’re not seeing from David’s perspective, then we’re seeing from Chaganty’s.

Indeed, Chaganty seems to be driving this investigation for the audience, and his approach becomes inconsistent around midway through the proceedings. What started as a frantic web and desktop search on David’s PC, followed by Margot’s Mac, Chaganty breaks the pattern in nonsensical ways later in the film. He cuts to security cam footage from inside a prison interrogation room or live news broadcasts that show David on the scene, begging the question: Who’s watching this video feed, besides the viewer of Searching ? Beyond directing our gaze without a consistent subjectivity, Chaganty also employs a tiresome score by Torin Borrowdale, which telegraphs every emotion we’re supposed to feel. The music also becomes a distraction when the suspense implied by the bombastic notes fails to match our emotional investment. Had Chaganty fully committed to the experience of web and computer searches, he would have allowed the visuals to speak for themselves and omitted the score altogether.

What works best about Searching is the emotional wallop concerning David’s discovery of Margot’s real life, and what that says about our relationship with technology. Still, for most of the 101 minutes, the film resolves to be a hackneyed and ineffective thriller. Chaganty’s unsubtle approach broadcasts every clue, relying on a tired formula where every detail onscreen proves significant in a dull way. Attentive viewers will see the twists coming. He also tells the audience what to think and feel in a bombastic way, whether it’s by the larger-than-life score or relying on sensationalistic local news broadcasters to hammer the stakes into our eyes. As a result, the film proves exaggerated and obvious, and it assumes the viewer is incapable of putting the pieces together. Rather than involving us in a mystery, it tells us the story of a mystery, which is a comparably disconnected experience. Although screened theatrically, Searching might work better on one’s laptop, where its blatant manipulation of the audience might not seem so false.

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‘Searching’ Movie Review: An Intense and Relevant Thriller

There have been two extraordinary, original, innovative, character-driven thrillers released theatrically this year and Searching is one of them. The other is A Quiet Place which opened in April 2018 and garnered overwhelmingly positive reviews. Strong word-of-mouth catapulted the $17 million drama to a worldwide $332 million box office. If the movie gods are fair, Searching should equal A Quiet Place ’s box office success.

Searching ’s difficult to write about as any detail of the story could lead to the unintentional reveal of a spoiler. What Searching is, without giving too much away, is the riveting tale of a dad, David Kim ( John Cho ), raising his daughter, Margot (Michelle La), by himself following the death of his wife. David’s a decent guy and a good dad, though it becomes obvious he hasn’t spent as much time listening to Margot as he should.

Margot goes missing and David, understandably, initially believes she’s off with friends. It soon becomes evident it’s not simply the case of Margot forgetting to touch base with her dad and instead the 16-year-old high school student has truly disappeared.

The police become involved and Detective Vick ( Debra Messing ) heads up what’s now a missing person’s case. David continues to do his own detective work and discovers his daughter’s world is nothing like he imagined.

Written by first time feature filmmaker Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian, and directed by Chaganty, Searching is an engaging whodunit with twists that aren’t telegraphed in advance. It’s not often a film is able to take an audience completely by surprise, and judging by the reaction of the audience at the screening I attended, Chaganty’s rookie effort accomplished that. I’m not a fan of people who make noise during screenings, but watching Searching is such a collective experience the audience seemed to bond via simultaneous gasps and signals of encouragement unheard by John Cho playing a father terrified for his missing child.

Cho delivers an incredible performance in a film that allows us into the story via the lenses of laptops, cell phones, and even the news cameras following the missing person’s story. David explores Margot’s world by delving into her social media, her texts, her emails, and videos. It’s striking how much he was unaware of leading up to her disappearance, and Cho’s performance makes us feel every ounce of pain, every bit of frustration, and even at times the anger he goes through as he frantically pieces together clues to his daughter’s whereabouts.

Debra Messing, Michelle La, and Joseph Lee (as John Cho’s brother) are equally terrific in bringing this captivating story to life on the screen.

Writer/director Aneesh Chaganty scores a knockout with his first feature and with Searching announces himself as a filmmaker to keep an eye on. An intense thriller that will keep you guessing to the end, Screen Gems’ Searching is a fresh, relevant take on the genre that pulls off telling a story in a new manner yet never stoops to gimmickry or tricks to enthrall the audience.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 (for thematic content, some drug and sexual references, and for language)

Running Time: 101 minutes

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Searching Is a Technological Marvel: Here's How they Made It

From concept to screen, director aneesh chaganty explains how he wrote, shot, and edited the groundbreaking thriller..

TAGGED AS: thriller

In a year that includes the biggest superhero crossover event ever, an almost silent horror smash, and a stunt-happy Tom Cruise risking his life about a dozen times in almost as many countries, it’s still fair to call  Searching one 2018’s most ambitious and audacious projects. The small-budget missing-girl thriller takes the  Unfriended formula to new levels: a father, played by John Cho , tracks his missing daughter by trawling through her social media feeds, calling her friends (mostly through FaceTime) and tracking suspicious people’s details through the darkest corners of the web. Director Aneesh Chaganty ‘s camera never leaves the laptop or smart-phone screen, and so we watch Cho’s anguished face in one window as YouTube videos, Venmo accounts, and emails spring up in others, revealing new clues in the case, and big twists in the story.

(Photo by Elizabeth Kitchens, ©2018 CTMG)

Chaganty, whose 2014 viral short  Seeds , shot entirely on Google Glass, has racked up millions of views, says the new movie took two years to complete, with the shoot itself taking just 13 days – the rest of the time was consumed by prep, editing, and animating. The work has paid off: The movie is a hit with critics (93% on the Tomatometer right now), who note that for all its technical achievements, it’s a story with plenty of heart and thrills. It had a strong first week at the box office, earning $360,000 in limited release before it opens wide this Friday. Ahead of its expansion, Chaganty spoke with Rotten Tomatoes and broke down exactly how he made one of 2018’s most impressive movies.

A UNIQUE ‘SCRIPTMENT’: “A traditional screenplay format wasn’t going to serve us well.”

“I read  A Quiet Place ‘s script, and it’s crazy because that script is just like 60 pages, and it didn’t even have to be 60 pages. It was like pictures of the Monopoly board…that script is so short, it’s crazy. But ours was definitely the same way. We realized early on that a traditional screenplay format wasn’t going to serve us well. What we ended up doing was basically – like every other process of this movie – creating an entire new workflow for it. We created what we ended up calling a “scriptment,” which is obviously a script meets a treatment, and basically creating the rules of this film. For example, if someone would type text and backspace it, it would be literally crossed off on the page. We split the whole scriptment into chapters, so they’re easily digestible. Because a normal script can tell you what needs to happen, that a scene is set in a sports bar, but how do you do that when you’re setting a scene on, like, a search bar? It is just a totally different way of writing, so we had to create a new format as well.”

A Seven-Week Head Start on Shooting: “We Should Make this movie before we make this movie.”

“This was Sev Ohanian’s idea, who’s the co-writer and producer. We were like, ‘We should make this movie before we make this movie.’ The reason being there are two cameras in this film. There’s the camera inside the walls of the movie, and there’s the camera of the way we’re framing all of that. And we needed to know how those two play with one another.

“We hired the editors seven weeks before [shooting] and we brought them to a room. And they would screen capture the internet and take photos and do little recordings of text messages and stuff. We ended up coming out with an hour and 40-minute cut of the movie starring me playing every role of the movie – the dad, the brother, the mother, the father, all of Margot’s friends.

“We showed that to the crew, the night before we started shooting, for them to understand what we were making. Most importantly, on set we used it with John’s character, because his character is the one operating the computer in the movie, but the computer [screen footage] is done by the time of shooting. He needs to know though where every eye line [is], every single button he needs to press so that he can look at it the right way, where every single cursor goes, every window pop up. He needs to know exactly what’s happening on the screen.”

CAPTURING ONLINE VIDEO CHAT, IN REAL TIME, WITH GOPROS: “They were acting up against almost nothing.”

(Photo by )

“We couldn’t set up a video village to save time, and basically we had a GoPro set up on [John’s] computer. And then in another room, on the other side of the house, is Debra [Messing, who plays a detective in the film] with the same setup. And they’re both looking at these programs, but they can only see the other person and they’re both wearing earwigs so they could talk to one another and we need to get clean audio. So, they’re talking basically to a computer screen that looks nothing like the one that’s going to be in the final version of the movie, and interacting with one another. They were literally acting up against almost nothing – a massive acting challenge that they knock out of the park.”

SHOOTING THE EMOTIONAL SEVEN-MINUTE OPENING: “We pitched it as Up meets a Google commercial.”

“We used four different actresses to play Margot over the course of 15 years in the opening montage of the movie. And there’s  changes in clothes, [we’re] changing everything, we’re changing literally the device she would use to capture everything, because we’re always trying to mimic the technology that it would actually be captured with as time goes on.

“John always cites that day as his favorite day of all 13 because it felt so natural. The opening montage, it really grounds the movie in something very, very emotional. Sev and myself pitched it as Up meets a Google commercial, and we basically went from there.”

HOW A WINDOWS BACKDROP CAN MAKE YOU CRY: “We wanted to turn small screen devices into a cinematic canvas.”

“That was a definite thing that we set out to do. We wanted to turn small-screen devices that we use all the time into a cinematic canvas. And the way we do that is basically by finding the emotionality underneath everything. Even something as plain and simple as the standard Windows XP backdrop of rolling hills carries emotional weight in this movie. Or seeing how crowded a desktop is, or seeing what photos are on a desktop in the movie – it means something. When we were writing, we were quickly realizing that in order for this movie to have some weight, every single button, every single aspect of the UI of the technology, had to mean something more than just what it was. That’s how we approached the entire movie.”

PLANNING FOR THE TECH’S OBSOLESCENCE: “EVEN BEFORE WE HAD FINISHED THE FILM, WE HAD MADE A PERIOD PIECE.”

“I don’t think any film in history has a quicker turnaround from being a modern movie to being a period piece of art. Even before we wrapped to edit it, even before we had finished the film, we had made a period piece, because inevitably Facebook had updated its UI or Google has changed something, or whatever. So, our solve for that was by setting the movie on a specific day. It takes place on May 11th, May 12th, and May 13th of 2017, and every single news item, every single front page, matches that. And every website matches how it was used, it looked, and worked on those specific days.”

FOCUSING ON AN ASIAN-AMERICAN, BAY AREA FAMILY: “There was an opportunity to give a younger version of ourselves someone to look up to.”

“We found out a couple days ago that we are the first mainstream contemporary thriller to ever, ever have an Asian-American lead, which is just crazy. It was important for me having grown up in San Jose to cast a family at the heart of it that looked like the families that I grew up with. I grew up loving movies, and all my favorite movies, none of them ever had characters that looked like me, or heroes that looked like me. And here was an opportunity for us to cast people, and give a younger version of ourselves, someone to hopefully look up to. Or just see as themselves. [The family] was Korean-American because we wrote the role for John Cho. But it was Asian-American with intent, because when’s the last time this has happened?”

Searching  is in theaters everywhere August 31

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Breathe’ on Paramount+, Bare-Bones Post-Apocalyptic Sci-fi Movie Pitting Milla Jovovich vs. Jennifer Hudson

Where to stream:, breathe (2024).

• milla jovovich

‘Alien Vs. Predator’ at 20: An Underrated Franchise Mash-Up That Overcomes Its Cash Grab Reputation

Stream it or skip it: ‘peter pan and wendy’ on disney+, director david lowery’s lightly visionary disney rehash, where to watch ‘resident evil’ movies before the series comes out, stream it or skip it: ‘the rookies’ on vod, a hyperbolic chinese action-comedy featuring milla jovovich in the rent-a-star role.

Breathe ( now streaming on Paramount+ ) is a cheapo post-apocalyptic sci-fi outing set IN A WORLD where the oxygen is thin and the characters are thinner. Directed by Stefon Bristol ( See You Yesterday ), the film keeps the setting tight and the budget tighter, casting genre stalwart Milla Jovovich as a stranger who may or may not be trusted by a survivalist family, led by Jennifer Hudson, who isn’t quite so sure if they should share their air. Sometimes small-scale sci-fi can be a tidy display of thoughtful ideas; sometimes they just regurgitate stuff we’ve already seen before. Let’s find out which camp Breathe falls into.

BREATHE : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: BROOKLYN, 2039. EVERYBODY’S DEAD. Well, not everybody . One family survives on a sunbeaten Earth where the oxygen levels plummeted, killing plantlife and most of humanity. “They” called Darius (Common) a nut for being overly prepared for the apocalypse, but “They” are all desiccated husks now. And so he and his wife Maya (Hudson) and teenage daughter Zora (Quvenzhane Wallis) live in a cozy bunker with electricity, an airlock, a solar-powered machine that generates oxygen, lots of cans of soup, a mini greenhouse (it helps that Maya is a botanist!) and a quality selection of John Coltrane – on vinyl even. They also have oxygen tanks and masks so they can venture outside the bunker if needed. The world out there is so yellow-bleached and barren, you almost expect WALL-E to tap on the door, asking for a cup of sugar.

The plot contrives to send Darius away for months, leaving Maya and Zora alone to bicker, and then face a serious Plot Development, in the form of a less friendly visitor than WALL-E. There’s two of them, to be precise – Tess (Jovovich) and Lucas (Sam Worthington). Tess says she knew Darius from way back, and just wants to check out the oxygen generator so she can fix her own, back in a bunker in Philly. Children’s lives are at stake, she pleads through an intercom. Won’t SOMEBODY think of the CHILDREN? 

The question here is whether Tess and Lucas can be trusted. In this economy? Hardly! Anyone who’s lived through an apocalypse knows that it makes people crazy and unreasonable, more likely to kill ya than help ya. And while Tess seems sincere, that Lucas guy is a bit of a loose nut. They’re armed, because they have to be, and the same goes for Tess and Zora. And anyone who’s been around guns knows that they make people crazy and unreasonable, more likely to kill ya than help ya. Inevitably, complications ensue, and whether we’re engaged with any of this or not – the latter seems depressingly probable – we can at least come to the conclusion that apocalypses and guns, and any combinations thereof, are no good.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Breathe is WALL-E meets The Road meets the siege sequence in The Two Towers , except with four people instead of, like, 40,000. Also, shout out to Common’s other post-apocalyptic sci-fi outing, the series Silo , which uses a similar setting to generate significantly stronger and more original drama. 

Performance Worth Watching: Let’s just remember nine-year-old Wallis landing an Oscar nod for Beasts of the Southern Wild and move on.

Memorable Dialogue: Zora delivers this doozy: “You ever heard of the Hindenburg, bitch? You shoot us, we all die! One spark and the whole place is on fire!”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: I think the core idea in Breathe beyond hey, suffocating is bad is the notion that trust is already fragile even without being recontextualized within a destroyed world. But that’s a generous reading of a film that seems content to follow through with cliches rather than work past or around them. The screenplay mirrors its wasteland setting, giving a capable and talented cast little to work with, the dialogue as off-the-rack as the visuals which, when not limited in scope, are mired by chintzy CGI. Granted, not every movie enjoys a nine-figure budget, but this dollar-store material doesn’t deserve more than dollar-store execution. 

One senses Bristol doing the best he can with a (painfully prevalent) lack of resources. But he exhibits a lack of control that puts the picture into a third-act tailspin: The director appears to mistake amplifying hysteria for building tension. Worthington indulges his character’s hidden psychopath, eating scenery in a manner that’s more annoying than entertaining. The bunker’s computer employs a female-voiced warning system that rarely shuts up, bleating its dire countdowns atop increasingly hectic action, which devolves into logic-deprived chaos during key climactic moments. For a movie that’s so thematically stripped-down, we shouldn’t be confused and wondering what the hell just happened, and how, and why. Just as the lack of air will kill a person, the lack of sense will kill a movie.

Our Call: *Gasp* SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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‘Men of War’ Review: A Delirious Doc About a Former Green Beret Trying to Overthrow the Venezuelan Government

Christian blauvelt.

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The fog of war , men searching for meaning in senseless situations, and the fraught interplay of competing drafts of history are themes that have popped up quite a bit in documentaries and narrative features premiering at the fall festivals this year. None of these have been built on quite as mercurial and ever-shifting a foundation as Jen Gatien and Billy Corben ‘s documentary “ Men of War ,” a nothing-is-what-it-seems head trip about a former Green Beret who tried and failed to overthrow the Nicolás Maduro regime in Venezuela.

Jordan Goudreau knew he wanted to be in the U.S. Army since he was a kid obsessed with playing “war” and dressing in combat fatigues. The fact that he was Canadian did not dissuade him. He knew he would likely not get to see combat in the Canadian Army, so he trained to be a Green Beret in the U.S. Throughout “Men of War,” he talks with reverence about his time in warzones and still says that he wants to fight for, and even die for, anyone who is oppressed. That’s a little harder because the U.S. Army recommended he not be retained after his years of service due to signs of unresolved PTSD. Throughout the film, the fortysomething Goudreau speaks with such an intense, unblinking resolve, it’s like he lives “in the moment” perpetually. And though that can have its value, particularly in a combat situation, it’s clearly resulted in an inability to see the bigger picture at times. Related Stories Barry Keoghan Has Read a Script for the ‘Peaky Blinders’ Movie and Says It’s Going to Be ‘Epic’ ‘Matt and Mara’ Review: Old Flames Rekindled in a Complex Drama with Casual Flair

As such, around 2019, upon entering into “contract work” — better known as mercenary work — he fell in with various members of the Venezuelan opposition to that nation’s government, ruled with an iron fist and flagrant disregard for democratic norms by Maduro. There was an ex-Hugo Chavez general who opposes Maduro named Cliver Alcala. There was Maduro’s outright rival, thought by many to have legitimately won a recent presidential election, Juan Guaido. And there was a Miami-penthouse-dwelling Venezuelan dissident named J.J. Rendon, who has a major thing for ninjas.

Gatien and Corben weave all these strands together in an engrossing tale, or rather, several competing narratives. There’s Goudreau, whose stated idealism undeniably was only part of why he got involved with these various figures’ plot to send a platoon of dissidents into Caracas to topple the government — the fact he was offered over $200 million for the mission was certainly a huge part of it. There’s Rendon and all the others interviewed for the film or captured in archival footage by Goudreau himself, who deliberately occupy a place of plausible deniability: If Goudreau’s coup attempt, Operation Gideon, had succeeded when it was launched in early 2020, they’d stand to gain. If it failed, they could deny involvement. (Spoiler alert: Operation Gideon did not succeed.)

No one is right and everyone is wrong here, and it’s a knot of plotting and backstabbing and misguided intentions and stated aims versus indifferent execution that makes what happened almost impossible to parse. And that’s the point, clearly. What is the truth when literally everyone involved is living their own separate version of the truth? There’s definitely a metaphor for the forever wars mindset in the U.S. for the past 20 years, of a feeling that some causes are worth pursuing even if you’re not sure why. But of course it turns out that some of the opposition forces here that Goudreau apparently believed in so much may have only wanted to enrich themselves: To weaponize people’s hatred of the Maduro regime and profit on that hatred to their own ends. There’s a suggestion that some of them are in fact covertly working for the regime.

Certainly, the Trump administration officials who decried Maduro endlessly to appeal to Venezuelan expat voters in South Florida had no real intention on any follow through. This is a portrait of what happens in the U.S. government when comms strategy replaces actual policy. You end up with something like Operation Gideon, not even a Bay of Pigs-level fiasco. More, as it was called at the time, a Bay of Piglets.

An unexamined life such as this can lead to a downward spiral. Twenty years of an unexamined national psyche can lead to catastrophe. For our nation, and others.

“Men of War” world premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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Thank the Cinema Gods, Mike Leigh Is Back

When characters in movies wake up with a sudden start, it’s usually an indication that they’ve had a nightmare. So, when we see Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the middle-aged protagonist of Mike Leigh ’s marvelous Hard Truths , startle herself awake in the film’s opening scenes, we figure she too has been having a bad dream. But over the course of the picture, we come to understand that Pansy is like this every time she wakes up: She catapults herself into consciousness with a violent half-scream. The nightmare, we realize, is the world she’s waking up to, not the one she’s leaving behind.

As played by the transcendent Jean-Baptiste (who was Oscar-nominated for her role in Leigh’s 1996 hit Secrets & Lies ), Pansy lives in constant fear and anxiety, which express themselves as an almost pathological hostility. She yells at her quiet, awkward adult son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), for going out on a walk, because she worries that he’ll be picked up for “loitering with intent.” She yells at her husband, Curtley (David Webber), for not giving the prospectless Moses a job working alongside him. At a furniture store, she yells at a random couple for putting their feet up on a sofa, then yells at the clerk for daring to help her. She gets in fights at supermarket check-out lines, first with the cashier, then with the other customers. There’s an obsessive-compulsive quality to her behavior. She furiously wipes down her couch in the mornings. She complains about half-open doors and over-filled kettles. Her home is immaculate — so clean and orderly and blank, it could be an unoccupied hotel room. She refuses to step into her empty backyard, complaining about “squirrel doodoo and rancid bird droppings.”

Pansy’s rants also happen to be hilarious, sometimes because of her observations (about fat babies and dogs with coats and why toddler clothes need pockets) and sometimes because of the creative vitriol she spews. Hard Truths might be Leigh’s funniest film in a long time, but as always, it’s the kind of laughter that comes with an unnerving feeling that something is going horribly wrong. We can think back to David Thewlis’s Johnny, the protagonist of Leigh’s Naked (1993), and his entertainingly cutting insults and millenarian monologues, which were symptoms of debilitating psychic wounds. At times Hard Truths also plays like the opposite number to Leigh’s 2008 comedy Happy Go Lucky , which featured Sally Hawkins as a relentlessly upbeat and friendly woman whose positivity ran at odds with the world around her. Here, it’s Pansy’s relentless negativity that puts her in conflict with the people surrounding her.

Beyond that, it’s clearly corroded her relationships. Moses and Curtley almost never say a word back to her. What good would it do? We get the sense that they’ve heard most of these rants before, though a few tell-tale shots suggest that Pansy’s anxiety has entered a new stage. (The film was originally set to shoot in mid-2020, and one wonders how this tale of a woman consumed with fear and rage at the outside world would have played at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.) Her younger sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), a hairdresser, is by contrast chatty and warm, with two vivacious daughters who don’t quite understand why their aunt is so sour. There’s family history there, to be sure, but Leigh is not one for easy explanations; he gives us slivers of backstory, hints at emotional scars. Everybody has their reasons, but the director is interested in the present, in the ways human behavior percolates out and affects others. He also looks for precise moments — those little exchanges and actions where the universe shifts forever. Leigh doesn’t always get credit for the visual power of his filmmaking , but there are several close-ups, particularly towards the end of Hard Truths , when we see on these characters’ faces a realization that nothing in their lives will ever be the same.

World premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival , Hard Truths is Leigh’s first picture in six years, and the first one he’s made in a decade with a contemporary setting. There is at least one masterpiece among his period pieces (that would be 1999’s Topsy-Turvy ), but his creative process does seem best suited for the present day: Leigh generally begins with an idea, a setting, or a situation, and then works with his actors to build their characters through exhaustive research and improvisation, eventually spinning the films’ stories up as they go along.

He’s been doing it this way for 50-plus years, and it’s produced a magnificent body of work. Leigh’s working-class characters have a specificity and shape that can only come from deep familiarity, and they resonate because they feel like variations on people we might have known. (We all probably have someone like Pansy in our lives.) But that dark edge of recognition comes with the glorious consolations of art: Even at their bleakest, Leigh’s pictures and his people explode with life. Some filmmakers make movies that feel like you could use them to reconstitute cinema if the art form ever vanished. Mike Leigh makes movies that feel like you could use them to reconstitute humanity if we ever vanished.

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Joker: Folie à Deux Review

Like harley quinn, the sequel is a little too obsessed with joker..

Joker: Folie à Deux opens in theaters Friday, October 4. This review is based on a screening at the 81st Venice International Film Festival.

Joker: Folie à Deux charges out of the gate with a novel approach to DC's most famous villain, but it soon settles into rote rhythms. Though advertised as a dreamy jukebox musical, the sequel to 2019's Joker is actually more of a courtroom drama, and not a very interesting one at that. The film works best when pushing towards new ways of seeing its central character – often through the eyes of a wonderfully realized Harley Quinn, played by Lady Gaga – but it too often insists on returning to familiar territory (and on occasion, familiar footage) instead of blazing a new path.

Arkham Asylum is now home to Joker/Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), whose daily routine involves being awoken by gruff prison guards who demand jokes from him while he empties his latrine. It seems like Arthur no longer speaks very much – he certainly no longer smiles – and director Todd Phillips, with the help of cinematographer Lawrence Sher, captures this mechanical morning process in long, unbroken takes that draw the viewer into Joker's grimy world. As he awaits trial, his lawyer Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener) insists he pleads insanity, and figures that the best defense is to treat "Joker" and "Arthur" as distinct personalities living in the same body.

Who is your favorite Joker actor?

Arthur, like most people around him, knows this is more of a legal strategy than anything resembling truth, but the question of how his adopted persona changes him constantly looms. On one hand, separating Joker's actions from Arthur's (and framing them as a trauma response) might get him an easier hearing. On the other hand, when he draws the gaze of fellow patient and avowed admirer Harleen "Lee" Quinzel, it seems like Joker is who he wants, and needs, to be.

Since the two meet during musical therapy, real and imagined songs are scattered throughout Folie à Deux's runtime. These familiar Hollywood tunes and vintage pop hits are sung passionately by Phoenix and Gaga, and some are even mixed with Hildur Guðnadóttir's eerie, booming score. The duo, at first, connects through song. They match each other's freak – the shared madness and delusion of the subtitle, what the French call “folie à deux” – but much of this ends up sidelined during the movie's lengthy courtroom scenes, which promise chaos when Arthur begins representing himself. Unfortunately, the delirium of Phoenix smearing on the grease paint to play both attorney and defendant isn’t quite delivered.

Joker: Folie à Deux: First Trailer Screenshots

After an initial hour set entirely within Arkham's walls, the sequel becomes a kind of referendum on the first Joker, though not in any meaningful, transformative way. Rather, it's merely an extension of the first film's plot in the most plodding and literal fashion. For a film that’s almost entirely liberated from its comic book source material, Joker: Folie à Deux is oddly constrained by its own predecessor. Returning characters show up to narrate events we've already seen, as Stewart asks leading questions about Joker feeling like a distinct entity from Arthur. On the flip side, the prosecutor is a smarmy Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) – the comics' villainous Two-Face – who's a treat to watch at all times, though his line of argument sheds little light on Arthur's actions or state of mind.

Perhaps the standout of this extended segment is Gary (Leigh Gill), Arthur's clown colleague from the first movie, whose dwarfism comes ever-so-close to being the subject of Arthur's comedic riffing when he takes the stand. If the sequel comes close to articulating an actual point about Joker – that is to say, the persona and identity – it's that the coping mechanism that shields Arthur from the world's cruelty makes him cruel in turn. However, like many potent ideas upon which Folie à Deux touches, it's soon discarded. Similarly, Arthur's upbringing and abusive mother, detailed in Joker, are rehashed ad nauseam, while the topic of Arthur's future with Lee (which could potentially involve a family) is quickly abandoned before it can offer any kind of thematic reflection.

This is the sequel's default M.O., making it a frustrating experience beyond its initial, Arkham-focused hour. At first, it creates a more careful and methodical aesthetic than Joker – each scene is carefully composed; each push-in has clear emotional intent – but as it progresses, it does little with its camera worth commenting upon. A few dreamlike flourishes do appear, though mostly to quote the familiar visuals of other musicals, like Jaques Demy's French New Wave landmark The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Francis Ford Coppola's sincere, expressionistic One from the Heart.

Apart from these stray references, Phillips' expressionism is limited to making each environment and lighting source resemble, in some way, a harsh spotlight on a stage, silhouetting Joker and Lee until they become defined by their shape – their iconography. It's a great idea in theory, and taps into the performance aspect associated with the Joker character, but it rarely evolves, visually or conceptually. It's just one of several things that ends up keeping the character in stasis, to the point that a vital emotional turn in the second half, which defines the movie's trajectory, comes entirely out of left field. It's one movie, and then suddenly, it's another.

That said, Phoenix clearly knows this character inside out by now. His posture is even more disconcerting this time; the actor is still shockingly gaunt, but the way he carries himself speaks to a body that has endured a life of abuse (something as simple as uneven shoulders can go a long way). When Arthur decides to embrace the "Joker" part of himself, this posture changes, almost fixing itself, as Phoenix sprawls out across the screen, luxuriantly, comfortably, and confidently – usually with a cigarette in hand. However, he never loses Arthur's inherent goofiness even when putting on this front. As the Joker slips between forms of presentation, his accent slips as well, going from British to American Southern and back, as if he can't quite figure out who (or what) he wants to be.

But if Joker: Folie à Deux has a not-so-secret weapon, it's Lady Gaga’s rendition of Harley Quinn, whose fascination with Arthur is the film's very foundation. It's a shame the movie never quite allows its musical elements to bloom (the energy of these segments only goes so far), because affording Gaga the chance to run the emotional and tonal gamut would have likely resulted in one of the greatest feats of screen acting modern Hollywood has seen. She even modulates her singing voice between the real Lee (an unprofessional who belts with an uneven passion) and Arthur's imagined version of her, whose singing is more, well, Gaga-esque. Sadly, she’s constrained by a subtle performance in a film that's anything but.

The careful line Gaga walks between adoration and mania is entirely worthwhile, and temporarily allows a commentary on fandom obsession to sneak its way into the picture. (Lee is practically a Manson girl.) However, in true Phillips fashion, this idea never really comes to fruition. Before it has the chance, Joker: Folie à Deux switches tangents yet again. That’s to say nothing of the movie's intriguing oedipal undercurrent, which frames Arthur's desire for adoration as a response to a lack of maternal warmth; no prizes for guessing how far this gets.

Joker, though scattered in its politics and committed to aping other, better filmmakers, at least had unifying visual and thematic motifs. It felt complete, albeit cobbled together. Joker: Folie à Deux departs from this approach – initially for better, though eventually for worse. Its more considered frames and character dynamics set the stage for musical romance that never blossoms – visually, acoustically, emotionally – giving way to a sequel weighed down entirely by its predecessor, despite how hard it tries to escape its orbit.

Correction: The original version of this review misidentified "Gonna Build a Mountain" as being written for Joker: Folie à Deux. All of the songs sung onscreen by Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga predate the movie.

The worst thing about Joker: Folie à Deux is its unfulfilled potential. It begins with the promise of a novel approach to the Joker and Harley Quinn, placing them in a world where the opposite of cruelty is musical romance. Unfortunately, the DC sequel gets bogged down by a lengthy courtroom saga, which not only keeps the dazzling Lady Gaga away from the spotlight, but centers the movie entirely around its own predecessor, without doing or saying anything new.

More Reviews by Siddhant Adlakha

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